A Realistic Metaphysics in the Hermeneutics of Judaism: The Understanding of Art in Baruch...

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9. A REALISTIC METAPHYSICS IN THE HERMENEUTICS OF JUDAISM: THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE POET AND THE NOVELIST IN BARUCH KURZWEIL’S CRITICISM OF MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE Ronny Miron The distinction common in modern philosophy between realistic approaches and metaphysical-ontological approaches is put to a radical test in the hermeneutics of Baruch Kurzweil (1907-1972), a Jewish-German scholar critic of modern Hebrew literature. The interconnection of realism and metaphysics in his interpretation of new Hebrew literature relies on three elements, each of which makes a unique contribution to his hermeneutics. The ontological element denotes the formative presence of a transcendent Being in Hebrew

literature and in Jewish history. The additional elements in this hermeneutics—the realistic and

the subjective—are largely shaped as a response to two central features of the transcendent Being itself: The revealed and the concealed. The realistic foundation sketches the context and space within which the transcendent Being leaves its traces. The subjective element deepens and establishes the influence of the realistic one, which protects against a dogmatic and predictable interpretation of the appearances of the transcendent Being. The formation of the realistic element and the subjective element affirms to a certain extent the primary and constituting status of the transcendent Being in Kurzweil’s hermeneutics. However Kurzweil’s thorough handling the three elements reveals the insufficiency of the ontological foundation in achieving a metaphysical understanding of reality. Thus, the link to real reality and the presence of the subject fill with positive content the evident certainty regarding the presence of a transcendent Being, without eroding the primacy of the ontological element in Kurzweil’s hermeneutics.

One of the common themes in the sociology and anthropology of culture is that secularization causes a radical change, or even a crisis, in the history of culture, or alternatively, begins a new history. This thesis may entail two different approaches to the historical reality. The first approach has a realistic orientation, assuming an ontology composed only of immanent entities. Accordingly, it focuses on the processes revealed in reality and on the meanings human beings grant them. From this point of view, secularization as a life practice and a world view is perceived as generating a crisis in the past tradition and as initiating a new reality, at the center of which is the sovereignty of human beings over themselves and their world. The second approach assumes that a transcendent Being is present in human reality and influences it to such a degree that it can overcome the mental processes involving subjects. From this metaphysical perspective, the attempt to remove God and to found a secular ontology in his stead cannot disperse his presence from human reality and prevent his influence over it. Indeed, the expressions common in modern culture of the personal experiences of absence, lack, loss, and yearning—experiences founded on the possible reality of what they lack—are interpreted as reliable indications of the continued transcendent presence in human reality and its influence over it, despite secularization.

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In spite of the difference between the two approaches described, they are intertwined in the realistic metaphysics of Baruch Kurzweil (1907-1972), a Jewish-German scholar, researcher, and critic of Modern Hebrew literature, one of the foundation stones of Jewish Studies in Israel, and the initiator of a comprehensive metaphysical interpretation of Jewish history in an era of modernism and secularization. Kurzweil is a relatively unknown figure, whose writings are in Hebrew and thus inaccessible to most researchers and intellectuals around the world, apart from those specializing in Jewish Studies. However, Kurzweil’s writings, published in the 1950’s and 1960’s, are saturated with influences from modern European philosophy, and particularly from the concepts of Being, truth, and art of Heidegger, with whose work he was very familiar. Moreover, in his critique of literature, Kurzweil develops a unique hermeneutic approach, bridging the gap, familiar in modern philosophy, between ontology and realism, without surrendering the resulting tension clearly apparent in each of the three elements of his hermeneutic approach. The ontological element deals with the perception of Jewish history as sacred history, presupposing that there is a transcendent Being present in it and influencing it. As we shall see later, as this perception is founded on a-priori evidence, it is supported by epistemic induction that grants it a realistic facet. The second element is portrayed in a realistic understanding of literary works, seeing them as reliable reflections of historical processes and changes. At the same time, poetry and prose are perceived as an arena where the traces of the transcendent Being are apparent. Finally, the third element is embodied in the concept of subject, responding to the classical phenomenological concept of a transcendental subject as granting meaning to both transcendent and immanent entities, and thus able to mediate between the hermeneutic ontological element and the realistic element. The subject in the literary work—the poet, author, or the characters they create—appears in Kurzweil as capable of granting the readers a reliable picture of reality—both the real reality, thanks to the subject’s awareness of historical processes and ability to predict their implications, and the metaphysical reality, due to the subject’s ability to locate the traces of the transcendent Being in human reality thanks to the subject’s special access to this Being.

Hermeneutics, whose building blocks are ontology, realism, and the transcendental subject, will be the focus of our discussion. The possibility of deducing Kurzweil’s hermeneutic approach from his interpretation of others’ work is supported by his opinion regarding the relation between creative work and the biography of its author. This means that just as poets and authors express themselves through their work, so too does Kurzweil’s own approach find expression in the literary criticism he wrote. However, this is not necessarily a process of “fusion of horizons” a-la Gadamer, in which the

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participants in a conversation may lose their individual separateness.1 Kurzweil believes that the creative act, like any human activity, involves independent metaphysical elements that shape the creative work and influence the meaning and interpretation it is given. The phenomenological reading proposed here to Kurzweil’s work seeks to follow the process of the formation of the three constituting elements of the unique hermeneutics he developed in his interpretation of modern Hebrew literature. At the same time, illuminating the prominent tangents between these elements and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger gives Kurzweil’s work a general context that extracts it from the particular Jewish cultural discourse, and allows it to be considered as one of the modern hermeneutic options.2

The Ontological Foundation: The Presence of the Transcendent Being At the basis of Kurzweil’s work is a metaphysical certainty regarding the existence of a transcendent Being in the reality in which Jews live and act. Kurzweil believes that this Being leaves traces—in both the metaphorical and the real sense—not only in the real existence of Jews but also in Jewish history and Hebrew literature. This approach plays a decisive role in formulating his hermeneutics. This was aimed at tracking the traces of the transcendent Being in modern Hebrew literature, while helping it fill with content his primary certainty regarding the presence of this Being in Jewish existence, and of its formative influence over it. Thus, Kurzweil’s hermeneutic work aimed to deduce from modern Hebrew literature an understanding regarding Jewish reality in the widest sense of the word—the one finding its expression in the real historical

1 Gadamer discusses the “merging of horizons” in several contexts, and develops the concept of “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung). See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. and trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989) (hereafter, TM), 306-307, 374-375, 397, 576. Regarding Gadamer’s ideas in this context see Anthony C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: A Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (Michigan: Zondervan, 1992), 205, 213. For further discussion of the relevance of Gadamer to the hermeneutics of Judaism see also Ronny Miron, “A Hermeneutical View of the Jewish Past: A Reinterpretation of Yerushalmi and Funkenstein’s Understandings of Jewish Historicism,” in Andrzej Wierciński, ed., Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Art of Conversation (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011), 617-646. 2 The relationship between Kurzweil’s work and that of Heidegger requires a separate discussion that will also encompass the various interpretations of Heidegger, to which the notes merely hint. Such a discussion would have to examine Heidegger’s unique pattern of influence over Kurzweil, and in particular to reveal the solution Kurzweil proposed to some difficulties arising from Heidegger’s concept of art.


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life, and the metaphysical one contained within it, through the traces of the transcendent Being present in it.3

The existence of a transcendent Being in Jewish reality was for Kurzweil an evident element, and as such, it did not require clarification or proof. Indeed, readers of his writings will not find there any systematic discussion of the nature of this Being or its essential connection to Jewish existence. It usually remains implicit within his interpretations of specific literary works, indirectly phrased, and often expressed through elimination. However, Kurzweil’s certainty regarding the existence of this Being is explicitly expressed in the contexts where he refers to God as the “great, real hero” of all the events described in a literary work and as their source of explanation (In Struggle, 125).4 In this spirit, he added elsewhere:

We should not search for the main reason for the tragic or atragic essence of leaving and returning in the heroes’ actions or their guilt. We see various fates, different structures of human character, meaning factors independent of the person… It is clear that the reason for the cruel fate, or for the grace, should not be sought in the person but in the sphere of God, revealed or concealed... Inexplicable and hidden divinity is the origin of the explanation [my emphasis] (Agnon, 201-202).

The expression “it is clear” in this passage reflects the certainty linked to God’s character and to the transcendent Being in general, which returns in other contexts. For example, in reference to the words “God is the one who knows why this is so” in a poem by Uri Zvi Greenberg, Kurzweil writes: “It is clear: God alone, the omnipresent, has solutions to the riddles of time” [my emphasis] (Our Literature, 127). In this context, as in other contexts, God does not denote merely an undisputed reality, serving as a source for explanations and meaning

3 The proposed interpretation accepts Kurzweil’s own argument that his approach did not stem from an Orthodox world view (Absurd, 416; In Struggle, 182), and differs from the common approach presenting him as an ideologist, usually of Orthodoxy. See for example Dan Miron, If there is No Jerusalem: Essays on Hebrew Literature in the Cultural-Political Context (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1987) [Hebrew], 121-125. An exception is the study of Goultschin, presenting Kurzweil as an interpreter of culture, see Moshe Goultschin, Baruch Kurzweil as a Commentator of Culture (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University: 2009) [Hebrew] (hereafter: Goultschin). 4 References to sources from Baruch Kurzweil’s writings will appear in the text using the following abbreviations: Absurd = Between Vision and the Absurd (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken,1973) [Hebrew]; In Struggle = In Struggle for the Values of Judaism (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1969) [Hebrew]; Drama = European Drama (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1980) [Hebrew]; Our Literature = Our New Literature –Continuation or Revolution? (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1960) [Hebrew]; Agnon = Essays on the Stories of S.Y. Agnon (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1962) [Hebrew].


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for any significant event, but is also a fact that is taken for granted. The identification of the transcendent Being with God denotes the most ontological core of the perception of this Being.5

However, like any ontological characterization, the one identifying the transcendent Being with God encounters the problem of expressing the transcendent using linguistic-epistemic means—a problem originating in the gap between the transcendent “out there” and the methods of conscious reference to it.6 On the face of it, this is an insoluble hermeneutic problem. But understanding that a work of art bears within it an essence that has to be understood in ontological terms, clearly relying on Heidegger’s perception of art,7 gave Kurzweil the safe anchor from which he could devote himself ceaselessly to searching for expressions of transcendence by the subject appearing in a variety of forms in Modern Hebrew literature. As he puts it:

Literature is one of the expressions of the life of the human spirit. Since the earliest generations, it has been considered a v a l u e. The nature of a value is that it cannot be merely formal. The formal expressions of any value testify to the “what” that they contain. The form encourages the

5 The influence of Paul Tillich’s theology on Kurzweil’s work, and in particular the linking of culture (including secular culture) with religion, is emphasized in Goultschin's study. See Goultschin, 117-143. For Tillich’s approach in this context, see Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1957), 55-65. Kurzweil himself lists Tillich among his teachers. See Drama, 114. 6 One of the central ways of handling this issue exists in the context of the problem of knowledge in Husserl’s thought, and much has been written on this topic. For a metaphysical perspective on this issue, see Damian Byers, Intentionality and Transcendence: Closure and Openness in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Seattle and Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 7 The main principles of Heidegger’s perception of art are discussed in several contexts in his work, and formulated in the work: Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in idem, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, Harper & Row, 1971), 15-87. (hereafter: Heidegger, PLT); Martin Heidegger (1936), “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” Holzwege (1935-1946) (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1977), 1-74. (hereafter: Heidegger, HW). See especially 36, 87 in English; 21, 61 in German. The roots of the ontological understanding of art exist in the Hegelian perception, in dialog with which Heidegger developed his approach. On the main principles of Hegel’s approach, see Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. Thomas M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) (hereafter: Hegel, Aesthetics). For further reading, see Karsten Harries, Art Matters: A Critical Commentary on Heidegger’s 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (New York: Springer, 2009), 1-17 (hereafter: Harries); Hans Jaeger, "Heidegger and the Work of Art,” in Aesthetics Today, ed. Morris Phillipson (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1961), 413-431; Jacques Taminiaux, “The Hegelian Legacy in Heidegger’s overcoming of Metaphysics,” in idem, Poetics, Speculation and Judgment: The Shadow of the Work of Art from Kant to Phenomenology, trans. and ed. Michael Gendre (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1993), 127-152.


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question and the curiosity regarding the nature of the “what.” The “what” hints at the reality of the essences. The essences are concealed. Sometimes they form, but their formation and their Being are silent. The forms… freeze the infinite, silent, and invisible essences into a limited presence, visible to all. Without essences there are no forms. Without forms, the essences remain in their dumb silence (In Struggle, v-vi).

Kurzweil’s approach implies that the human experience of transcending testifies to the insufficiency of the epistemic plane for searching for meaning and value in existence. This insufficiency directs human beings to transcend and constitute a link to the transcendent reality. Moreover, the experience of transcending reveals a more fundamental truth regarding Being, whose roots are in Heidegger’s approach regarding the truth as non-concealment (a-lētheia), means that it is simultaneously revealed and concealed.8 In our context, the transcendent Being is present in Jewish reality, but due to its metaphysical nature, its presence is not overt, and is sometimes even concealed. This complex pattern of transcendent presence explains the basic difference between it and the earthly Being, which can either appear externally or not appear at all. Kurzweil argued that literary work constitutes an appropriate image of the presence of the transcendent Being in Jewish reality, since this Being leaves its traces in modern Hebrew literature, even when it is not a theme in these works, and even when their content expresses explicit rejection of its existence. Thus, the latency of the transcendent Being in Modern Hebrew literature does not detract from the certainty regarding its existence, since this certainty is not dependent upon revealing its traces and interpreting them, and in any case is not exhausted by them.

8 The concealment of the Being along with its non-concealment is discussed in many contexts in Heidegger’s work. See for example Heidegger, HW, 67-68; Heidegger, PLT, 80-81; Martin Heidegger (1927), Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt a.M.: Klosterman, 1951), 185; Martin Heidegger (1927), Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. 1962), 211; Martin Heidegger (1927), Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer. 1953), 33-34 (hereafter: Heidegger, SZ); Martin Heidegger (1927), Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 57-58 (hereafter: Heidegger, BT); Heidegger, SZ, 28; Heidegger, BT, 50. Martin Heidegger (1930, 1943), Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Frankfurt a.M.: Klosterman, 1961) (hereafter: Heidegger, WW); Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” trans. John Sallis, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 115-138 (hereafter: Heidegger, ET). For further discussion of the links between the concept of truth and Heidegger’s perception of art, see Joseph J. Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), 81 -99 (hereafter: Kockelmans); Daniel E. Palmer, “Heidegger and the Ontological Significance of the work of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 38, no. 4 (1998): 407-409 (hereafter: Palmer).


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Severing the dependence of the transcendent Being on its appearance, and understanding concealment as one of its ontological characteristics provided Kurzweil with an essential foundation for his interpretation, which saw “the modern Hebrew literature… [as] literature of the religious problem” despite its “arising from a secular world” (Our Literature, 110). In Kurzweil’s opinion, the secularity of this literature enables it to express a human reality from which the character of God has been removed, without this depriving it of the ability to simultaneously serve as a substrate bearing the traces of the transcendent Being in Jewish reality.9 Reality serves the literary work as a source of inspiration and an object of reference, but the concealed transcendent Being penetrates it and is present in it in different ways. Just as Heidegger believed that a work of art is not exhausted by its concrete dimensions, which he included as expressions of “thingness,” so Kurzweil argued that a literary work is not exhausted by the boundaries of reality.10

Another aspect, through which the literary work expresses the presence of the transcendent Being in Jewish reality, is portrayed in the identification of this Being with the Jewish past in the tradition.

The tradition of the fathers is the tradition from Sinai…. The eternal presence of the revelation on Mount Sinai is so omnipotent it fills all the time space of all the generations. After it there is no innovation… If Sinai is the eternal presence, it cannot be otherwise. Eternal truth is static. Each and every generation is the “Sinai generation.” What is considered a historical development is nothing but the eternal return of the same truth. [My emphasis] (Absurd, 57-58).

Kurzweil does not himself link the Jewish past, as accumulated in the tradition, to the transcendent Being. But characterizing this past as the reality in which “the barriers between past and present” are negated (Absurd, 106), or in other words: “What happened ‘as if from generations past,’ characters and events from thousands of years ago… seems to live within us. They are real.” (Absurd, 35). This enables Kurzweil to see the past, like the transcendent Being, as a firm, unconditional, and permanent presence in the existence of the Jews. Like Heidegger, who rejected the accepted approach assuming a chronological order in which the past is identified with the transient and the present with what 9 See Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Randon House, 1990), 110-112. 10 Heidegger argued that one of the first things anyone notices when encountering a work of art is that it is a thing not created by nature but by a human being (Heidegger, PLT, 18-19; Heidegger, HW, 3). However, Heidegger himself clarifies that the “thing” that is the work of art does not exhaust it: “Presumably it becomes superfluous and confusing to require into this [thingly] feature, since the art work is something else and above the thingly element. This something else in the work constitutes its artistic nature” (Heidegger, PLT, 19; Heidegger, HW, 4). For further discussion of this issue in Heidegger, see Kockelmans, 110-124; Karsten Harries. “Shame, Guilt, Responsibility,” in Alan M. Olson, ed., Heidegger and Jaspers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994) (hereafter: Harries), 69-81; Palmer, 400-405.


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leads to the future, in favor of an approach unifying the three dimensions of time, so also Kurzweil sees the past as a static supra-temporal or even a-temporal layer permanently present in Jewish reality.11

Furthermore, alongside the ontological power the Jewish past embodies, according to Kurzweil’s approach, it also contains an epistemic depth, since this past is a continuous object of interpretations by Jews throughout the generations. These interpretations, which constantly refer to the meanings of its contents, some of which were identified with a divine source, are in fact the veryJewish tradition. The classical perception of this tradition as making the divine speech present using human tools, and of a transcendent presence in general, well-established in Kurzweil’s thought, reveals a deep linkage to Heidegger’s concept of “logos,” denoting what can induce and reveal the “what” about which there is speech.12

This combining of the ontological and the epistemic elements in the explication of the transcendent Being is well apparent in Kurzweil’s argument that the same “traditional religious world” that serves as an “epic object” denotes “expressions of Jewish life with its own justification and internal reason within reality and above all realities” (Agnon, 200). “Within reality,” since the transcendent Being permanently serves as an object of reference for those who identify it as belonging to the reality of which they are part, and “above all realities,” since this Being is considered the constant and independent source of the world of tradition, and it is responsible for Jewish existence not being completely assimilated into real historical processes. In fact, Kurzweil states that

11 Heidegger presents the approach linking the three dimensions of time in the fifth chapter of Being and Time, see Heidegger, SZ/BT: §§72-77. For further regarding on this issue, see Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (Dordrecht, Boston and Hingham: Nijhoff, 1988). Kurzweil’s approach linking past, history, and Being is influenced, among others, by Löwith, who is mentioned several times in his writings. For example: In Struggle, 159. In this context, see Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1949); Karl Löwith, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichtsphilosophie (Zürich/Wien: Europa Verlag, 1953). Despite his deep connection to Heidegger’s perception of art, Kurzweil did not share Heidegger’s criticism of Hegel’s approach identifying art with the past. As Hegel put it: “In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Hegel, Aesthetics, vol.1:11). It appears that unlike Heidegger, Kurzweil did not adopt the contrast between the ontological perception of art and the recognition of the presence of a-historical or even eternal elements in the human experience, influencing it. Kockelmans asks: “How can Heidegger still escape from Hegel’s conclusion [that art is a thing of the past] and thus from Hegel’s entire position?” (Kockelmans, 84). It seems that the problematic nature of Heidegger’s criticism of Hegel is not just of concern to Kurzweil, whose approach encompassed ontology, eternity, and historical memory. 12 Heidegger, SZ, 32-34; Heidegger, BT, 57-59. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Kockelmans, 94-96.


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the transcendent Being is more important than human reality, and superior to it: “God is truth…but since reality is also truth, despite everything it is not possible to claim as a result that God is reality—since he is larger than it” (In Struggle, xii-xiv).13 The gap between the transcendent Being and real reality, of which the world of tradition is a part, is exhausted in Kurzweil’s argument that there is a contrast between human experience of the transcendent Being and the effort to grant it meaning and significance, i.e., the former is saturated with evidence, and the latter often encounters difficulty in mediating between the ontological aspects and the epistemic language. Against this background, Kurzweil presents himself as seeking:

To go a long way and argue that the characteristic and quintessential in this reality [of the creator] should be seen in reality ceasing to be in all senses a uniform reality. Past, present, and future collide in it… The recognition arises that worlds that contradict each other have found their home in the poet’s soul at one and the same time. This very recognition would suffice to justify why the accepted realistic description… no longer seems like an artistic expression suitable to the new conscious experience (Agnon, 84).

Thus, Kurzweil connects the restricted access of reality to human consciousness with the metaphysical approach that cannot be exhausted within the boundaries of realism. Indeed, the drive to transcend the boundaries of human reality already exists in the experiences of human beings and authors in contradiction, in the limited nature of consciousness, and in experiences of dissatisfaction.14 However, literary works, as expressing this transcending and as an arena where, among other things, the transcendent Being leaves its traces, cannot be exhausted within the boundaries of the human reality they deal with. This insight marks the furthest edge of Kurzweil’s effort to deal with the hermeneutic problem of expressing the transcendent using linguistic-epistemic means. His reading of modern Hebrew literature succeeded in retrieving from it various features of the transcendent Being—God, sanctity, essence, truth, logos, and the traditional Jewish past. These can be considered as milestones or even anchors 13 The linkage between the Being and truth is a central theme in Heidegger's late thought. Truth is considered in this context as embodying the Being in its expression or in its non-concealedness (aletheia), and as the Being itself (Sein). Under the influence of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Heidegger defines truth as the revelation and the original discovery of the Being. See for instance Heidegger, WW/ Heidegger, ET, §5, §6; Heidegger, SZ/ Heidegger, BT, §44, §45. 14 The relation between experiencing dissatisfaction and the evidence of the Being denotes a Hegelian element. In Jaspers’ approach, this relation is tied to a transcendent Being. On this issue, see Ronny Miron, “Transcendence and Dissatisfaction in Jaspers’ idea of the Self,” Phänomenologische Forschungen, NS. 10. (2005): 221-241.


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for formulating an appropriate epistemology of transcendence. However, these features are not self-standing without the evident recognition of the existence of a transcendent Being. Moreover, it seems that an appropriate epistemology of transcendence is impossible, and the effort to obtain it must end with a return to the basic starting point from which the metaphysical search began: evidence regarding the influential presence of a transcendent Being in the reality in which Jews live and create. The Realistic Foundation: The Representation of Reality in Literature The connection between literature and life and the present reality constitutes for Kurzweil the axiom that should guide both the reader and the literary critic. His premise is that “the epic truth is subject to the authority of time” (Agnon, 68), and thus “every true work of art is a phenomenal appearance of a certain reality, and in any case it is knowingly or unknowingly filled with the problems typical of the exposed reality” (Our Literature, 5). The argument that literature takes its materials from the present reality and from the reality that will grow from it into the future is explicitly expressed in the following passages: “I do not believe that poetry and literature burst out and arise from some vacuum. They are always an expression, knowingly or unknowingly, of what is happening, or what is about to form, within the society, within the nation from which they grow and arise” (Absurd, xiii-xiv), or elsewhere: “What is decisive is that at times when almost nobody seriously considered establishing political sovereignty, Greenberg’s poetry foretold… the revolution that would come following the revival of the national mythos” (Absurd, 23). Kurzweil goes further and argues that Greenberg’s poems are “proof” of processes that had occurred “recently” no less than the establishment of the State of Israel (Absurd, 40). In his opinion, “the two events,” meaning Greenberg’s poetry and the establishment of the State of Israel, “have the same meaning. They are the deepest and most exciting symptom of what has happened in our era” (Absurd, 40).

Kurzweil does not propose a theoretical explanation for his ontological perception of literature, connecting it to real life and to the transcendent Being. But like others of his generation, first and foremost Heidegger, he believed that literature could serve as an effective foundation for transcending from the artist’s subjective and particular world to a reality of which the work is an image. In this spirit, he states that “literary problems are much more than merely-literary problems; or they are not also literary problems” (In Struggle, 54), and adds elsewhere regarding the author that “this fertile turning inwards, diving into the layers of the self [is] as the only means of approaching what exists in the world.” (Absurd, 116). Kurzweil’s certainty of literature’s relation to external reality is so deep that it enables him to argue that the “phenomenal


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vision of [the] particular reality” can be retrieved through discovering “the immanent constancy” of the literary work itself (Our Literature, 5).

Furthermore, Kurzweil argues that the ability of works of literature to serve as a reflection of the internal truth of past historical events is greater than that of historical research: “Literary revelations are more true and much greater than historical studies… Above and beyond the internal truth of the poet, of the great author and his work, the essence of the truth of the contemporaries is revealed to the readers” [my emphasis] (Absurd, xiv-xv). Hence he states that “poetry has precedence over science” (Absurd, 98), and that “poetry [comes] before history in revealing the portrait of our nation in the twentieth century.” (In Struggle, 268).15 In another place: “It sometimes seems that our great poets are closer to the truth in their poetic vision than all the scholars of Jewish Studies put together” (In Struggle, 239). Furthermore, poets’ better access to the transcendent Being compared with that of historians is also apparent in their work, meaning that poetry and prose are better than historical research in describing and understanding reality and its essence due to the artist’s relation to the transcendent Being present in them. As Kurzweil puts it: “Poetic visions have precedence—in the power of their authentic truth and their ability to formulate the essence of reality—over the description of history and historiosophic theories” (In Struggle, 270).

The perception of literature as reliably reflecting reality leads Kurzweil to define the author as offering the readers “a complete summary of the face of the world about whose portrait [the author] is wondering” (Agnon, 164), and as “struggling to discover the truth and reality [of the world] that only the poet is called and destined to give them to him and to us” (Agnon, 161).16 The author is described in this context “as just a transparent medium” (Absurd, 102), through whom reality is revealed, without the author’s self-participating in its formation. Moreover, Kurzweil determines that the readers of a literary work expect it to give them an understanding of reality, “The profound reader will be grateful to the author for the honesty of his stories, to the degree that they reflect our reality” (Agnon, 187). Finally, the fidelity of the literary work to the reality from which it emerges becomes a fundamental criterion in examining its value as a literary work.

Kurzweil harnesses to his support of literary realism the literary style used in the work of literature. In this context, he states that “every literary genre has its own world. It is no coincidence that a particular period and a particular society view a certain literary genre as their artistic expression” (Agnon, 18).

15 On the advantage of the poet over the research historian, see also Kurzweil, In Struggle, 239. 16 On the perception of literature as filling a social mission, see Meyer Howard Abrams, The Mirror and the Lump: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 14-21.


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The Heideggerian approach linking freedom and responsibility in the discussion of authenticity clearly echoes here. Heidegger’s fundamental argument in Being and Time, and later in “The Origin of the Work of Art” is that responsibility requires the ability to respond appropriately to a given state of affairs, and that the criterion cannot be purely subjective.17 The restriction of the individual’s freedom, perhaps even more radical than that in Heidegger’s approach, is also apparent in Kurzweil’s position, whereby not only matters related to reality or events force themselves to serve as the subject of the work, but artists are not free to choose the style they wish, to the point that he believes poets are forced to choose “only one way” (Absurd, 23) when coming to express processes they see before their eyes. In this spirit, Kurzweil argues that “within such a significant alteration of the world, the story technique changes too” (Agnon, 165), and accordingly, “different perceptions of reality… dictate to the artist ways of performance expressed in the choice of various epic forms that fulfill each time the assumption from which the artist approaches reality.” (Agnon, 199). Kurzweil does not list all the types of style suitable to different realities, but he hints at this, arguing that “These stories [of Agnon] should be seen as an important contribution in the search for a new artistic expression, suited to our situation” [My emphasis] (Agnon, 187).

In any case, literature is deeply rooted in human life and history, and this does not lock it within the boundaries of the exposed real experience. The certainty that permeates Kurzweil’s literary analysis that a transcendent Being is present in reality and influences it, directly and sometimes covertly, removed the possibility of there being a full congruence between the real experience serving as the direct and overt object of reference for the literary work and the ontology at the basis of both the literary work and the interpretative act. This means that the expressions of the transcendent Being present in the literary work transcend not only the boundaries of the text but also the immediate contexts of real life. However, in his opinion, literature is one of the highest human ways of referring to the transcendent reality. As he puts it: “Shoshana, like all the women in Agnon, is not a symbol and not an allegory. She is the presence, the constant formation of Jewish beauty, reflected beyond itself, beyond reality, transcendence that is its native land” [my emphasis] (Agnon, 299), or elsewhere: “In the story “From Apartment to Apartment” we feel the transcendent weight of the apartment, which is like any symbol, is also itself, a concrete apartment, but also symbolizes a metaphysical world, from which the narrator cannot separate” [my emphases] (Agnon, 64).

Moreover, there is a connection between the presence of the transcendent Being in present reality and the power of the literary work to penetrate the 17 Heidegger, SZ, 344; Heidegger, BT, 395. See also Ronny Miron, “The Guilt which we are: An Ontological Approach to Karl Jaspers’ Idea of Guilt,” Analecta Husserliana, vol. CV (2010), 229-251; Harries, 49-64.


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secrets of this reality and carve from them the picture of the future that will follow. At this point, Kurzweil is clear: “The same cruelpotential reality that disturbed the poet’s rest, many years before this became actual reality for all of us, is the most real thing, and at the same time it transcends all the boundaries and all the possibilities that the human mind and imagination can perceive. Although the poet foresaw the disaster before it happened, he knew well that all his poems were a sort of struggle with the impossible, that no expression, even the most powerful, could express” (Absurd, 36). In any case, whether the work of literature serves as a historical testimony saturated with the consciousness of the present, or transcends the boundaries toward the future, this is inherent in literature’s special access to the transcendent Being. As he put it: “The existence of this Jewish experience had a double support, in both directions, up and down, to the earth and to heaven” (Absurd, 40).

The duality typical of the work of literature, attributing to it the ability to exhaust the historical process, but also the power enabling it to transcend it, meaning to turn to both “earth” and “heaven” at the same time, allows us to examine the boundaries of the literary realism at the basis of Kurzweil’s hermeneutics. While a realistic interpretation of the literary work would have imprisoned it within the boundaries of the present’s concrete here and now on the one hand, and of the distinct events of the past on the other hand, Kurzweil’s understanding seeks for more, without detracting from the literary work’s ability to express a historical reality. Thus, even though the literary work is strongly linked to present human reality, Kurzweil states that “whatever the nature of the present, it itself… carries within it… islands of another reality” [my emphasis] (Absurd, 39-40). This reality, sometimes also characterized as “religious presence” (Absurd, 23), is the transcendence, the fact of whose presence Kurzweil determines as an undoubted truth. As he puts it, “The way of poetry opens the horizons of selfhood, but this selfhood is ‘transcendent,’ serving endlessly as a point of ‘distant signaling’” (Absurd, 144).

One of the dramatic implications of the perception of literature as rooted in life—life that also contains the presence of a transcendent dimension—is that there is no real possibility of seeing literature as fiction. Just as reality, in both the real and the metaphysical sense, forces itself on a person, so it forces itself on literature. According to Kurzweil, “to the same degree that an artistic endeavor turns into a concise and symbolic expression of the society and people from which it emerges, so it negates any attempt to avoid its tidings” (Absurd, 3), or elsewhere:

The innocence in the story collides with the signs of destruction in the Jewish world, and those gaps shockingly endanger the artistic illusion of the perfection of the Jewish world and its absolute value… This is a romantic irony, which could destroy in a blink of the eye the world of


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absolute illusions… here the weakness of this world transpires in its inability to overcome reality… that particularly stresses the dangerous and the ridiculous of the illusion [My emphases] (Agnon, 23).

Inevitably, the surplus power of the reality that forces itself upon literature diminishes also the importance of the aesthetic component in the work of literature: “The poetry of U. Z. Greenberg represents the daring attempt in our literature to renew the ancient mythos of our nation. This mythos is no fiction, it is as real as can be… All the poet’s life, every line he has written in the past decades, can already today serve as a historical testimony that something has happened here that is completely different from devotion to national-literary amusements” (Absurd, 23). In another place, the events of the period and the nation’s fate are described as “what bars the devil’s way to great lyricism” (Absurd, 266). Thus, Kurzweil presents the aesthetic consideration as a temporary scaffold and even as an illusion that is moved to the margins of attention and interest once the reality for which the literary work serves as a medium is revealed.

It is difficult to miss the great similarity between Kurzweil’s approach to the aesthetic dimension in a literary work and Heidegger’s fundamental critique of the aesthetic approach in “The Origin of the Work of Art.”18 Moreover, the dominance of the question of Being in Heidegger’s whole philosophical work shares the same spirit as the deep commitment Kurzweil expressed toward truth and reality in general, a commitment that gave his hermeneutics its ontological foundation. In contrast, the aesthetic approach was perceived by both of them as denying the essential link between beauty and truth, and granting the beautiful a decisive status and importance in organizing the relationship between the parts of the work.19 In this spirit, Kurzweil described the poet as “struggling to discover the truth and reality” of the world (Agnon, 161)

18 In this context, see Pöggeler’s argument whereby Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” is part of Heidegger’s study of Being, and should not be read as a work on aesthetics or the philosophy of art, even if this work could contribute to these fields. Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1987), 167. For a different approach, see Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1994), 20-38; Walter Biemel, Martin Heidegger: An Illustrated Study (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 92-148. See also Günter Seubold, “Die ‘Pöggeler—v. Herrmann Kontroverse,’” Kunst als Enteignis: Heideggers Weg zu einer nicht mehr metaphysichen Kunst (Bonn: Bouvier, 1996), 41-47. 19 On the connection between truth and beauty in Heidegger, see Heidegger, PLT, 69; Heidegger, HW, 81. Walter Biemel expressed this well when he stated, following his teacher Heidegger, that a real work of art should reveal how we encounter beings, including other people and ourselves. Its role is to reveal the way people stand in the world, and to serve as


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Furthermore, Kurzweil argues that the marginality of the aesthetic dimension in Hebrew works of literature distinguishes it from literary works in other cultures. Thus, in his opinion, “The attitude of Thomas Mann to the biblical mythos in The Tales of Jacob and his use of biblical metaphors and symbols is artistic” and “the elements of religions and cultures are the tools and servants of artistic expression.” In Kurzweil's opinion, this attitude lacks “something similar to the living presence of the mythic historical vision, which is a purely artistic medium and not the actual present historical reality.” In contrast, in a Hebrew author such as Greenberg, “The metaphors do not convey only the words from here to there, and as a result are not merely a cultural or aesthetic medium. They enliven the historical situation as a demanding presence” [my emphasis]. Kurzweil therefore concludes that “the relationship of our greatest poet to literary elements is not literary” (Absurd, 91-92).

There is a clear connection between the minimization of fiction and of the aesthetic consideration in the work and its commitment to representing historical reality. Just as history is not merely a chronicle of past events and also enfolds the complex of relations formed between them, so the literary work is not equivalent to the lives of the characters or events it discusses, but turns from their depths to the future and to the present. On the one hand, Kurzweil’s words show that the literary work’s being rooted in the present world enables it to understand the restrictions placed upon it by time and place. Thus, the poet and author cannot “just imitate categories of the past without examining the difference of the situation” (Absurd, 19), and they are described as subject to the “authority of time” (Agnon, 68). On the other hand, the literary work faces the future proactively—as bearing tidings, predicting, and prophesying. In this spirit, Kurzweil writes about Agnon that “The great epic visions of S. Y. Agnon reflect, unconsciously, our new situation… before the Second World War, Agnon foresaw the loss of the diaspora. That Shabush-Buchach is ever since a symbol of the fate of our nation” (Absurd, 5), and regarding Greenberg that his poetry had completed “the historical process… before it partially became reality” (Absurd, 24). While for the poet, these were “the mental landscapes of the presence, the meaning of the historical events of our time,” that is, linked to the present, but his words transcend them because this meaning “was not revealed to the contemporaries” (Absurd, 50).

Finally, the literary work’s being anchored in the living world of the present, and its ability to serve as a historical indication, grant the work its compelling nature due to which there is “no refuge and no escape” from it

the highest expression and portrayal of truth. See Walter Biemel, Die Bedeutung von Kants Begrundung der Ästhetik und Philosophische Analiysen zur Kunst der Gegenwart (Den Haag, Nijhoff, 1968).


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(Absurd, 4). In this spirit, Kurzweil states that even if a person seeks to “close his ears” or to avoid Greenberg’s poetry:

History itself comes along, the bitter fate of your nation comes and proves you wrong. It forces you to face the amazing accord of a certain regularity revealed in them, between the both sweet and discordant voice of the poetry you attempted to ignore (Absurd, 4).

Kurzweil does not stop with this statement, referring to a particular poet, and phrases it as a generality applying to literary work as a whole: “To the same extent that an artistic endeavor becomes a concise and symbolic expression of the society and nation from which it emerges, it refutes any attempt to avoid its tidings” (Absurd, 3).

Analysis of the realistic foundation of Kurzweil’s hermeneutics has revealed the deep relation of the literary work to the historical reality, and also its transcending the boundaries of space and time, achieved thanks to the traces of the transcendent Being permanently and unconditionally present within it. This duality does not allow us to adopt an interpretative approach that sees the overt text as the be-all and end-all of the reality it entails, in the neo-criticism spirit that treats the text as an autonomic unit. Instead, Kurzweil’s reading aims at the hidden depths of the text, where the typical duality that links immanence and transcendence dwells. This duality typical of the literary work is merely a reflection of the duality in human life, rooted in reality but not restricted to it. In this respect, the realistic approach to literature should be understood as expressing an ontological approach whose implications are hermeneutic, rather than the other way around.

The Subjective Foundation: The Transcendental Bridge between Realism and Metaphysics The third facet of Kurzweil’s metaphysical interpretation of modern Hebrew literature deals with the status of the subject—first and foremost the author, but this also projects onto the interpreter, and onto the understanding of the literary characters. Kurzweil’s basic argument in this context is that at the depths of the work as such lies a solid biographical element linking the characters and the perceptions in the work with the author. Kurzweil expressed this regarding the work of others. Thus, for example, he argued that the external changes described in the plot of the story are not the main thing, but rather “the fateful change that takes place in the poet’s soul” (Agnon, 81); “The epic poet Mendele does not stand outside the circle of his characters… [there is] ‘a shared life’ of the author with his heroes.” (Our Literature, 174); “It is most interesting that both the


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types, to which Agnon grants full individuality and names, he perceives as actually part of himself” (Agnon, 140). Similarly, Kurzweil testified about himself in the first person, “My personal thoughts and opinions about Judaism, about literature, and about Jewish studies, I… think from myself.” (In Struggle, 159).

However, the biographic aspect does not receive an autonomic status in Kurzweil’s interpretation of Modern Hebrew literature or in his own work. In fact, the formation of the author subject’s character as a whole was intended to serve as a touchstone for the ontological aspects that deal with the Jewish reality as bearing a transcendent presence.20 This metaphysical observation permeated his perception of the relation between the literary works he dealt with and their authors. Eventually, it led to reducing the weight of the author subject in the literary work in favor of focusing on the reality—real and transcendent—of which the literary work serves as an indication. This outcome is an achievement of transcending from the author’s self, on two basic levels in parallel. One constitutes a withdrawal from the author’s area as an individual whose living space is subjective to the collective realistic Being. The other is expressed in ascending from the real experience to the transcendent dimension it contains. These are in fact two movements, horizontal and vertical, which Kurzweil’s interpretation itself directs toward the literary works, arguing at the same time that a real event stands as the basis for their constitution.

The first transcending is directed first and foremost at the psychological experience of the creator, and its aim is to retrieve the meaning of the work from its subjective and private boundaries. Thus, assuming that “the story does not describe the fate of the narrator alone.” [My emphasis] (Agnon, 172), Kurzweil states that “We cannot be satisfied with determining the ‘tear’ in the poet’s soul.” (Our Literature, 155) and even if “we should take into consideration the psychological facts… they are never capable of deciphering the secrets of the work” (Absurd, 326). The minimization of the weight of the personal dimension has a direct implication for understanding the subject of the work. Kurzweil states explicitly that “the individual personality is not the main subject of this vision, but the fate of the larger self, the suffering and fighting individual, the representational, who takes on forms and sheds forms” (Absurd, 100). The main hermeneutic implication of this aspect of deviating from the author’s self relates to understanding the work’s narrator, and Kurzweil himself insists that “with all the importance of the mental and biographic process we must avoid an error that this is a purely individual matter. Because Greenberg’s poetry intensively and concisely expresses what has happened in the nation’s consciousness, knowingly or unknowingly, in the recent period” (Absurd, 40).

20 On the issue of the subject’s status, there is similarity between Kurzweil’s approach and the one at the basis of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. See TM, 290-300.


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This means that even if the work’s writer does indeed experience the creative process as an individual, this experience also involves matters of the collective to which he belongs, and the relation to the external reality shared with members of this collective. In this respect, the literary work can be understood as an expression of the self-consciousness of the nation and as a reflection of the real experience surrounding the creator and permeating his works.

On the second layer, this transcending is apparent in the generalization of the author’s character into an archetype of collective existence: “The life and work of Brenner the man are also an expression of the one of the tragic options of the life of Jews in general” (Absurd, 324). Beyond the deep connection of Jews to the religious law of Judaism, on which Kurzweil relied in different contexts of discussion, this particularly stresses the link to the Jewish nation, its history, and its unique fate: “The poet’s despairing lament for the loss of his God is much more than a personal expression of his mental orphancy. [The poet] Fayerberg is also revealed at this point as a profound thinker perceiving his personal fate as a symptom of the fate of his nation” (Our Literature, 167); “The poet self is linked to the most distant past. It originated in the vast distance and bears within it the events from the lives of the ancestors” (Absurd, 79); “From exclusive and insistent dedication to the flaming fire in his soul, his poetry obeys only the immanent truth of the history of his nation” (Our Literature, 125). This means that the historical reality does not serve merely as an artistic medium, which is a background and inspiration for the work that is not in itself committed to this reality. Indeed, Hebrew literature’s unique nature is expressed in the author’s commitment to its representation. Therefore, understanding the literary work as providing a historical testimony deepens and establishes the process of reducing the weight of the author’s subjective personality. Kurzweil escalates his argument regarding the author’s ontological connection to Jewish reality when he describes the author as being forced by the historical reality of the collective experience of the nation: “This is not Alterman’s fault. This is the fate of his contemporaries, who lost the roots of ecstatic religious faith” (Absurd, 266). It transpires that the Jewish collective serves simultaneously as subject, object, and speaker of the work.

The connection and the involvement of the work in wide historical processes require authors to restrain and restrict themselves, so that they are not placed at the center of the event of which the work is a fruit. Kurzweil hints at this struggle: “An internal reality encounters an external reality.” In this struggle, the power of the latter, “which cannot withdraw or surrender” overcomes. Eventually, authors place themselves at the service of the historical reality, and as a result the “truth of poetic vision and the truth of religious fate [become] identical… [and] the tools of poetry are the slaves of this vision,” meaning that they are subject along with the author employing them to historical reality (Absurd, 92). Commitment to historical reality creates a clear spectrum


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between the subjective restraint and restriction in favor of the collective self, and the reduction of the weight of the aesthetic values and the movement away from fictional language. The employment of aesthetic considerations, and even the choice of a particular style, express the subject’s sovereignty over the text. However, since for Kurzweil the reality is the main thing, the subjects are required to demonstrate self-restraint and self-restriction in the face of the reality transcending the boundaries of their consciousness—both real and transcendent. This is precisely the meaning of Kurzweil’s statement: “The choice of the literary form is binding” (Absurd, 417), meaning that authors are not free to choose the form or style according to their wishes, but there is a reality external to them that largely dictates the path along which they lead the work.

The interpretative move that rescues the authors from their private boundaries and reveals the deep relation between the work of authors and poets to the Jewish collective and to Jewish reality in the wider sense contains two opposing trends. One generalizes authors’ private work, and as a result authors transpire as representing and portraying their nation. The second particularizes the work in relation to the universal analysis tools of literary criticism. This stresses the uniqueness of the literary work as a Jewish work, requiring an appropriate perspective. These two trends do not add up into a contrast, since the realm of the generalization and that of the particularizing position are tangential, meaning that the collective Jewish existence the authors create is a detail within them.

Without doubt, the transcending of Kurzweil’s hermeneutics from the boundaries of the subject as an individual, apparent in his removal of the author from the center of the work in favor of presenting the Jewish historical reality, was essential for realizing his metaphysical yearning to study Jewish reality. However, Kurzweil was not satisfied with this transcending, even though it is not limited to the boundaries of real human experience. Later, to complement it, his writings depict a different transcending, appealing more directly to the metaphysical level beyond the boundaries of the real experience to which literary works refer. “The dialogues… were written from a vision of a new reality, wider and deeper than the one in the field. This reality is supra-individual, supra-temporal. The mental existence within it is beyond the personal and above the personal.” In Kurzweil’s opinion, “The most personal landscape of experience is at the same time transpersonal, hinting beyond itself… the self creates poetry and discovers itself and the landscapes even and only with the vision of the ‘second reality’ that is beyond time and beyond the personal” (Absurd, 78); “The art of the story aims here at the depths of existence, beyond and underneath the rationalist layer, which is the reality in the field” (Agnon, 309). Elsewhere, he described the author’s experience of this reality explicitly as an experience of “the sudden eruption of the transcendence into the split immanence… a unity that is above individuality, it cancels the


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separation between person and person, between person and Creator, it creates the happy experience, the supreme joy of ‘one piece,’ of ‘one manifold’” (Agnon, 280). Later, Kurzweil stresses, particularly in his interpretation of Agnon’s works, the self-surrender and even self-denial of the author, and compares the author’s exceeding the boundaries of his self to “any mystical experience” (Agnon, 280). Like any mystical experience, the one involved in the literary work originates from the individual, but the significance granted to the experience itself no longer bears the individual’s personal seal.

In the second transcending, Kurzweil deals with the literary expressions of absence, of loss, and of negation typical of modern works. On the immediate level, these experiences describe the exposed and disrupted reality in the presence, about which Kurzweil’s observation concludes that “the world is not right, it is not divine, it is accidental” (Agnon, 181). His writings contain a wide range of descriptions of this reality: some related to the individual’s experience, such as suffering, the problem of eros, and loneliness. As he put it: “Deep deep in their souls, Brenner’s heroes know that what causes the pathetic process of the diminishing eros is ‘religious collapse,’ meaning a Jewish world without God, a human world without a Creator, without gods” (Absurd, 299); “Loneliness is cosmic, the self is as if detached from ‘the whole world’ and has not found correction due to the modern curse of singleness, which prevented him from uniting with the God of mercy and pardon… The lonely self did not receive what the whole world was blessed with” (Agnon, 258).

Additional expressions of loss and absence also refer to the individual’s experience, but they express a more general social reality, with an emphasis on the phenomenon of secularization in which there is a transfer of “all authorities and all titles of divinity—to poetry.…The use of all the concepts of religion and mystery transfers to poetry and to the poet the validity of the divine tidings” (Absurd, 151). Kurzweil argues that the reality of secularization creates a new concept of transcendence anchored in the individual and in the world reality. “The process of secularization in our new literature has reached its peak in poetry that opens to use a new transcendence, which is in fact an internalization and a diving into the springs of the self” (Absurd, 149). While any experience of transcending, even the one experienced by the secular author, expresses a yearning for Being and a search for the “mysteries of what is” (Absurd, 148). Indeed, Kurzweil states that the “diving into the springs of the self” that is not accompanied by recognition of an external and autonomic transcendent reality is “a dangerous adventure of the self with itself,” that imagines it is rising above the given reality while “its rise… on the ladder is actually a descent and diving into the springs of the self” (Absurd, 148). In his opinion, this “diving” eventually leads to “the illusion of transcendence [that] leads to the false unity in which the person is a bridge to himself” (Absurd, 133). Moreover, the search for “the heavenly within the earthly” nests “alongside nothingness and emptiness”


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(Absurd, 132), so that eventually “God’s mysteries give way to the mysteries of nothing” (Absurd, 287). This means that the reality anchored in the individual, embodied in the phenomenon of secularization and in modernity in general, is ruled by the lack and the absence, and it is unable to grant the individual the fullness embodied in the experience of Being.

There is a fundamental connection between Kurzweil’s observation of modern reality, linking the centrality of the subject within it to the experience of vacuum and absence that it entails, and Heidegger’s approach that, following Hegel, criticized modern aesthetics, which by granting centrality to the experience (Erlebnis) has made art a thing of the past.21 Heidegger and Kurzweil did not see the realistic vision of art in the present as a final word. Heidegger believed that Hegel’s statement whereby experience is the dimension in which art died, “indeed has not yet been decided and decision upon the judgment will be made, when it is made, from and about the truth of what is.”22 According to Heidegger, only Being’s view point, in which the concept of truth is anchored as a lack of concealment, is relevant to the evaluation of a work of art. At this point, Kurzweil passes the threshold of the possibility of the future existence of art, which Heidegger believed had yet to be decided. For Kurzweil, the reality of the work of art rested on the safe ground based on the evident certainty regarding the presence of a transcendent Being in Jewish existence, which accompanied his entire hermeneutic endeavor: “What exists without value and Being, it is as if it does not exist, and what passed and moved on is Being through whose value everything is measured” (Agnon, 243). In this extreme statement, not only does Kurzweil reject the possibility of identifying reality with its appearances, he also hints indirectly that the transcendent reality, in which reality and concealment are inseparably intertwined (In Struggle, v-vi), is a source for content and meaning in the Jewish existence whose present is ruled by lack. Thus, the expressions of lack become a medium mediating with the transcendent Being, or alternatively, means confirming it. Finally, these expressions and the meaning Kurzweil’s interpretation of Hebrew literature bestows upon them do not enable the present to be perceived as a total reality. This is precisely the difference between a realistic world view, relying mainly on the appearance of things, and Kurzweil’s metaphysical world view, in which the appearance of immanent reality does not embody the whole of existence. On the immediate level, the lack denotes the subjects’ experience of the transcendent reality as one that is not present to them. However, on the deeper level, this experience directs to the more primary intuition regarding the existence of this reality, an intuition without which even the experience of lack would be without meaning. The daring move Kurzweil makes in this context is 21 Heidegger, PLT, 79-80; Heidegger, HW, 66-67. For further discussion of this issue and the links between Heidegger’s approach and that of Hegel, see Harries, 1-7; Kockelmans, 81-88. 22 Heidegger, PLT, 80; Heidegger, HW, 68.


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not limited to the negative facet of rejecting the realistic world view, but focuses on its positive facet: an explicit definition of the concealed and the absent in terms of the reality he calls “a different reality” (Absurd, 39-40), or a “second reality”:

Sometimes beyond the conditions of real life, which cannot be overcome, and which show the full rule of alarming time, poetry carves out paths to see an expression of a second reality, standing outside the normal rule of time anchoring… We are dealing with ‘internal’ time, the ‘human’ time that is not subject to the authority of external, non-human time (Absurd, 258).

Not only does Kurzweil have certainty regarding the existence of a reality transcending the boundaries of real existence, he also identifies it with the transcendent Being revealed in the Jewish religion and tradition. Now it transpires that Kurzweil does not distinguish between the transcendent Being and its religious content as portrayed in the real existence of Jews. His words always link them together, as we can see in the following:

The most personal experience of landscape hints beyond itself… the self creates poetry and discovers itself and the landscapes even and only with the appearance of the ‘second reality’ that is beyond time and beyond the personal… The poet self is connected with the most distant past. It originates in the far distances and bears within it the events of the lives of the ancestors (Absurd, 79).23

The certainty regarding the existence of the transcendent Being is not damaged by its concealed nature. Indeed, this Being is capable of overshadowing the visible reality in the present, which as a result is described in terms of absence and lack: “The world of the present as it exists due only to coincidence, following some cosmic ‘negligence’; it does not actually deserve to exist after what happened… and into this external reality bursts a character, a child of the concealed, internal reality” (Agnon, 179).

Furthermore, Kurzweil retrieves from the mentioned evidence the key to the ontological-metaphysical understanding of concrete literary phenomena he identifies in modern Hebrew literature. Thus, after discussion the experience of

23 See also: “The same poetry reveals… a completely different picture, basically positive, ideal, yearning…for some world that was completely pure. It is interesting that this magic picture, wholly saturated in harmony and wholeness, belongs to the past, the distant or near past” (Absurd, 13). Elsewhere, the phrase “two realities” returns, with one referring to the present and the other to the past. See for example Agnon, 178; Agnon, 253; Absurd, 49; Absurd, 80.


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denial entailed in suffering as an “indictment not directed at any address” in Brenner’s stories, he states, “Suffering, the suffering of the individual, single person, despite its baseness, is the reality of realities” [My emphasis] (Absurd, 290). Kurzweil does not blur the fact that the only confirmation of the transcendent reality is not given in Brenner’s work itself, and himself phrases the paradox of attempting to produce a positive picture from experiencing the absence (Absurd, 291): “The pathos of negative religiosity hints at its source of origin. It appears that Brenner’s characters will never forgive God for not existing for them” (Absurd, 286-287). His interpretation builds the bridge leading from the lack and absence experienced in real reality to the certainty required, in his opinion, by the presence of the transcendent reality. Thus, he argues that the very reference to transcendence, even if this is a negating reference, affirms its reality.

This approach continues in the interpretation Kurzweil proposed for the problem of eros, arguing that, “the eros cannot release the self from itself[…] because Brenner’s characters lack faith in the transcendent meaning of the eros” (Absurd, 294). In contrast, Kurzweil himself knows that “without faith in mystery, in something transcendent, even eros is something ‘naked,’ ‘monotonous,’ a false-worship” (Absurd, 295). Kurzweil grants a similar meaning to the experience of loneliness, interpreting it as directed as an external reality deviating from the boundaries of the self:

The flaw depends on the ‘self.’ But in parallel to the internal emptying, the external emptying is described… The flaw is internal. The lonely person wants to pray and cannot… The external reality is imagined, it is a child of the flawed time. The Being, the truth, belonged to some reality whose memory is only preserved in the depths of the poet’s soul. Where is that reality? There, in the far distance, in the good time, in the proper age that had its values, before the split, before the great abandonment and loneliness (Agnon, 241-242).

Kurzweil’s approach to the individual’s personal experiences of suffering, in his attitude to the eros that has been damaged and in his burning loneliness, which gave expression to the negating character of these experiences, but at the same time sought to grant them a positive meaning by exposing the way they refer to the transcendent, is also apparent in his perception of secularization. Thus, although he saw secularization as an inclusive position of principle, “the atmosphere of the spiritual soul of a particular period” (Our Literature, 46), and understood the gap created between secularization and a religious world view as creating tension “that actually has no solution” (Absurd, 155), he stated that Hebrew literature in the twentieth century “is guided and lifted by the vague knowledge of the existence of the eternal, inseparable connection linking the


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essence of the nation with the soul of its Torah, with its spiritual destiny,” and that “On one point all the authors agree. There can be no revival without searching for the unity that was lost, without which there is no renaissance, and ignoring it reveals the horrors of loss and the abyss” (Agnon, 283). This means that secularization and the individual’s personal experiences of loss and absence, which constitute the fate of modern people in general, are not contained within their own immanent boundaries; they indicate what exists beyond them, or alternatively, the metaphysical foundation on which they rely, dealing with the permanent and unconditional presence of a transcendent Being in the reality in which Jews live and act.

What is the relation between the two transcendings from the self-described—one escaping the realm of the subjective Being, and the other breaking through the boundaries of reality? On the face of it, the second transcending denotes a more severe and deeper version of the first, since the depth it achieves from the self is greater. In this case, the second transcending, rising up to the transcendent in reality, can be considered as making it unnecessary to withdraw from the personal realm of psychological subjectivity. However, this option is problematic, since it strengthens the metaphysical foundation in such a way that undermines the other two pedestals of Kurzweil’s hermeneutics: the realistic and the subjective. Moreover, this possibility would imprison Kurzweil’s approach within the realm of evident certainty, without enabling progress beyond the starting point anchoring his thought.

I wish to offer an interpretation that requires both transcendences, and also affirms the three elements of Kurzweil’s hermeneutics. This interpretation is based on many contexts where Kurzweil stresses the unity of the individual’s most subjective privacy and the collective reality to which authors refer in their works. Thus, for example, he argued that precisely “because his [the author Brenner’s] personality was so great and rich in its possibilities, the subjective in his writings achieves a large extent of objective validity” (Absurd, 324).24 It appears that precisely because objectivity is perceived as exhausting the subjective power, the author experiences the loss of faith in the era of secularization as a “private disaster” (Our Literature, 161). Kurzweil’s statement that “this surrendering,” meaning the author’s surrendering himself,

24 The use of the phrase “objective validity” does not express an attempt by Kurzweil to give his ideas a scientific flavor, in the spirit of Jewish historicism. Quite the opposite. Kurzweil often distinguished himself from this approach, declaring he was “a person who does not believe in ‘objective science,’ and certainly not in objective historical research” (In Struggle, 138). On Kurzweil’s polemic with Gershom Scholem around the significance of the phenomenon of Jewish historicism, see David Myers, “The Scholem-Kurzweil Debate and Modern Jewish Historiography,” Modern Judaism 6/3 (1986): 261-286; David Biale, “Gershom Scholem and Anarchism as a Jewish Philosophy,” Judaism 32 (1983): 70-76.


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“is also a proof of the power of the author’s stubborn, demonic will to entrench within the dimension of sacral art in order to achieve perfection and in order to grant his nation the unity it had lost” (Agnon, 287), marks the subject as the bridge between the real element and the metaphysical one. This is the result of the special access with which the author is blessed to the transcendent Being, due to which he also has to portray it for his nation. Kurzweil clarifies that experiencing transcending from the boundaries of the self to another reality serves as a more reliable method for authors to connect to themselves:

The poet can understand the meaning of his life, himself, only in the process of full spiritual communion with the internal meaning of the history of his nation… We are not just us. We are important only to the extent that we know how to live and also enliven the burden of the past. The poet is a creature with deep historical consciousness, and only to the extent that his poetry at least hints at its historical connections does it acquire the deep dimension preserving it from becoming a passing phenomenon (Absurd, 106-107).

Thus, even if the author expresses things in the first person perspective of characters created from his imagination, still “all the subjective-confessional that is one of the most important symptoms of that state of mind that views the loss of faith in a living, personal God as a disaster, an existential shock” (Our Literature, 199). Now it transpires that any transcending from the boundaries of the self—first to the collective and later to the transcendent Being—may simultaneously serve as a source for deepening and establishment within the boundaries of the self. Kurzweil withdraws then from the mystical characterization of the transcending experienced by the author, and even defends the status of the self in this experience. This is not a contradiction within Kurzweil’s perception of the author, but an attempt to empower the ontological meaning of experiencing transcending. Eventually, the two transcendings join together and form a circular path that necessarily leads to the individual who served as a starting point for the transcending. This also affirms that the three pedestals of Kurzweil’s hermeneutics are essential. Conclusions The distinction common in modern philosophy between realistic approaches and metaphysical-ontological approaches is put to a radical test in Baruch Kurzweil’s hermeneutics. The interconnection of realism and metaphysics in his interpretation of New Hebrew literature relies on three elements, each of which makes a unique contribution to his hermeneutics. The ontological element


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denotes the formative presence of a transcendent Being in Hebrew literature and in Jewish history. His position whereby this Being leaves its traces in Jewish reality and creative works led to the marking of transcendence as the most encompassing and inclusive object of the interpretative endeavor, thus set on the path of tracking its traces. The formation of a permanent object to which the springs of interpretation and understanding are channeled prevents the possibility that in this hermeneutic approach the text would be granted an absolute status. Moreover, the loftiness and concealment of transcendence does not allow interpretation to achieve completion. However, Kurzweil’s hermeneutics is not condemned as a result to be speculative, thanks to the strength of the evidence regarding the presence of the transcendent Being constituting an axiom in his approach.

The special status of transcendence, as existing outside the realm of doubt and undermining, makes it into the safe ground on which Kurzweil’s hermeneutics leans. But its other features, particularly its ability to penetrate the immanent reality in which people operate and its concealment in relation to this reality, do not enable it to serve as a sole anchor in this hermeneutics. The additional elements in this hermeneutics—the realistic and the subjective—are largely shaped as a response to two central features of the transcendent Being itself. The realistic foundation sketches the context and space within which the transcendent Being leaves its traces. The integral importance of the realistic element in an evidence-based hermeneutics serves as a barrier against the hermeneutics becoming dogmatic and predictable. In other words, understanding that transcendence appears in a dynamic human context does not permit the interpretation of transcendence’s appearances in real reality using a fixed or prepared pattern. Indeed, transcendence absorbs the multiplicity, the variety, and the surprise typical of the real reality in which it shows its face, and is enriched by them. This means that no less than transcendence casts its reflection into real reality and grants it meaning, essence, and value, the various facets that transcendence reveals in its penetration of real reality are stamped with the features of real reality. Thus, like Hegel’s phenomenology, the hermeneutics of transcendence in Kurzweil’s thought transpires as the phenomenology of real reality itself. Indeed, Kurzweil saw Hebrew literature not only as an arena for the presence of the transcendent Being, but also as a reliable reflection of the historical processes that found the Jewish nation in the modern era.

The third element, the subjective foundation of Kurzweil’s hermeneutics, deepens and establishes the influence of the realistic element, which protects against a dogmatic and predictable interpretation of the appearances of the transcendent Being. As we have seen, the author subject’s approach is influenced, among other things, by his biography and by private and particular experiences that introduce into the text a variable whose content can be known only in hindsight. However, this is not the only contribution of the subjective


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element. In Kurzweil’s hermeneutics, the basic struggle that every author faces—between an internal reality and an external reality—turns into a lever for dealing with the duality typical of the transcendent Being, which is simultaneously revealed and concealed. Thus, within what has been termed the “first transcending” from internal reality, the author’s subjectivity and particularity undergo processes of qualification and restraint aimed at helping the author open up to historical reality and real reality in general. Since this reality serves as a field of revelation and appearance for the transcendent Being, the constitution of a passive position within the first transcending can also be seen as a form of the author’s acceptance of the revealed facet of this Being.

After making a journey from internal reality, the author also deals with external reality in the “second transcending.” This is a more radical externality that the one to which the “first transcending” led, since the transcendent Being exists beyond the realm of real-historical reality, or alternatively, this Being also contains a facet of concealment. This facet shapes the author as an active character “struggling with the discovery of [the world’s] truth and reality” (Agnon, 161). The activeness of the author is portrayed in granting expression to this latency, or, alternatively, in unveiling the transcendent Being to expose its expressions in real reality.

The formation of the realistic element and the subjective element in response to two basic characteristics of transcendence—the revealed and the concealed—affirms to a certain extent the primary and constituting status of the transcendent Being in Kurzweil’s hermeneutics. However, we should not conclude from this that the realistic element and the subjective element have a secondary or marginal status in his hermeneutics. Indeed, Kurzweil’s thorough handling of these elements reveals the insufficiency of the ontological foundation in achieving a metaphysical understanding of reality. Thus, the link to real reality and the presence of the subject fill with positive content the evident certainty regarding the presence of a transcendent Being, without eroding the primacy of the ontological element in Kurzweil’s hermeneutics. It appears that like Hegelian totality, the totality forming in Kurzweil’s hermeneutic endeavor constitutes within a network of relationships between components none of which can obtain an independent or separate status. To be precise, as long as any hermeneutic element is perceived as having an independent status, this indicates the primacy primordial and partial nature of the understanding. But as understanding matures, the separateness of each of the components is dimmed in favor of the brightness and clarity of the whole, at which Baruch Kurzweil’s hermeneutics was always aimed.

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