“Never Will I Hear The Sweet Voice Of God”: Religiosity and Mysticism In Modern Hebrew Poetry

Let me begin this essay, on recent books dealing with issues of religiosity and mysticism in modern Hebrew poetry, with Gershom Scholem. Scholem rarely wrote about modern Hebrew poetry, and yet at least one of the authors discussed here, Hamutal Bar-Yosef, explicitly positions her study vis-à-vis Scholem. This is because Sholem’s magisterial scholarship on Jewish mysticism and religious experience, as well as his meditations on the “religious” and the “secular” in Hebrew, are as good a starting point as any to engage the questions these volumes raise. One of Scholem’s most rich and enigmatic texts is Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache (Confession on the Subject of Our Language; 1926), which was included in an anthology of texts dedicated to Franz Rosenzweig on the occasion of Rosenzweig’s fortieth birthday. In this remarkable text, the young Scholem characterized as illusory or “ghastly” the desire to secularize Hebrew words that had long evoked profound religious meaning:

What about the “actualization” of Hebrew? Must not this abyss of a sacred language handed down to our children break out again? Truly, no one knows what is being done here. One believes that language has been secularized, that its apocalyptic thorn has been pulled out. But this is surely not true. The secularization of language is only a façon de parler, a ready-made phrase. It is absolutely impossible to empty out words filled to bursting, unless one does so at the expense of language itself. The ghostly Volapük spoken here in the streets points precisely to the expressionless linguistic world in which the “secularization” of language could alone be possible. . . . In a language where he is invoked back a thousandfold into our life, God will not stay silent. But this inescapable revolution of the language, in which the voice will be heard again, is the sole object of which nothing is said in this country.¹

This “confession,” written as part of Scholem’s ongoing dialogue with figures such as Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and H. N. Bialik, deeply expresses his understanding of the dialectics between the sacred and the secular, the hidden and the unconcealed, the esoteric and the public, the mystical and the political, in the Hebrew language.² It speaks about the forgotten elements of Hebrew that perhaps have been neglected in the Zionist enterprise of “actualization” and “secularization.” These dialectical tensions were far from resolved thirty-seven years later, when Scholem claimed, in an address entitled “Reflections on the Possibility of Mysticism in Our Time” (1963):

In the final analysis, one may say that there is no authentic original mysticism in our generation. . . . Two centuries have passed since the most recent major awakening in the history of Jewish mysticism, which represented a new and, for the present, last stage of those wishes or yearnings of the soul known as mysticism.³

Scholem was referring to the Sephardic Beth-El Yeshiva and the Hasidic movement in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, which he saw as the last stage of Jewish mysticism, as well as “the last great religious outburst within Judaism, as the gates were about to close.”⁴ However, almost at the same breath, he also wondered: “perhaps mysticism will be revealed, not in the traditional garb . . . perhaps holiness will be revealed within the innermost sanctums of secularity, and the traditional concepts fail to recognize mysticism in its new forms?”⁵ These doubts clearly indicate that Scholem at least considered the possibility that new formations of Jewish mysticism and religious creativity could appear outside traditional Judaism, but he did not indicate the shape that these new reincarnations might take. The comparison that Scholem drew between Kabbalah and modern poetry certainly indicates that his understanding of the religious and mystical aspects of some modern writers (non-Jewish and...