Thus Spoke Harold Bloom
Reading Bloom
An Aside:
I am also not certain about this newsletter format. I think if people have the interest they will find the site organically, like in the old days. But I understand the limitations and the digital overload. Still, I do not feel comfortable about invading the inboxes. Seems like always a bad time to read. I know there is an option with Subsack not to send emails with the posts. Have to un-click each post individually, I think I will try it, at least selectively.
Harold Bloom on Rabbi Akiva
I felt depleted, and I turned to the sublime sage, Harold Bloom in “Possessed by Memory”. Bloom wrote this book when he was already fading. But like all his books it is a spiritual testimony of the greatest Rabbi we never had. Bloom describes his physical falls, he writes he can no longer hear birds, but he hears the poems and chants them by heart.
Harold Bloom opens many of his books with this author’s note:
All Bible excerpts are from the King James Bible, unless otherwise noted in the text. Excerpts from Shakespeare tend to follow the latest Arden edition. I have in a few places repunctuated according to my understanding of the text and restored Shakespeare’s language, where I judge traditional emendations to be mistaken.
Perhaps because of the language, Bloom’s grasp of the English literature is much deeper than his ownership of the Jewish text. I don’t know most of the classical English works that Bloom comments on, beyond the titles that is. However, I made a goal to read Shakespeare along with modern English translations, so I can follow Bloom’s inner commentary.
Bloom writes that he chants Koheleth, Tehilim in Hebrew and English all his life.
“Though Solomon is second in prestige only to David among all of the kings of Israel, he is an ambiguous personality. He builds the Temple, but we wonder why he should have been esteemed not just for wealth and erotic intensity but also for wisdom. David is an endlessly fascinating human being. By comparison, Solomon is a mystery. The book of Kings is highly ambivalent toward him, and his supposed authorship of the Song of Songs and of Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) is unpersuasive. Through 1 Kings 1–11, the story of Solomon seems to be told with considerable irony. We do not feel any affection for him at all. Instead we long for his charismatic father. Wealth, worldly achievement, contemporary fame—all these fade away where there is no personality.”
When Bloom compares King David to Hamlet it this “personality” that is his sole interest. Hence, the speculation that the passages of Genesis and the story of David have the same Shakespearean author, the eternal texts describe the drama and the characters.
Harold Bloom remembers:
“Yesterday an old friend visited and reminded me we had met at a temple in Washington, D.C., half a century ago, when I lectured to the congregation on the elements in normative Judaism that were imported by Rabbi Akiba and his school from Platonism. I did not intend to be contentious, but many of them were troubled by my insistence that nothing in Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) stated that a people or an individual could become holy through study. Although that seems now the most Judaic of commonplaces, it did not exist before the Platonic influx into second-century B.C.E. Palestine. In discussion afterward, several of them expressed dismay when I summed up by saying that normative Judaism was an extremely persuasive misreading of Tanakh, carried out by Akiba and his followers to meet the needs of a Jewish people under Roman occupation. I cite this only as an instance of how subtle and complex the reading of a great literary text can be, since without Akiba’s misprision Judaism could not have survived. “
Well, Rabbi Akiva was a convert on the tail end of the ideological development that goes back at least 300 years. He was also a meshichist, so doubtful he had the long-term plans. Lets’ see, the staging of the heroic but doomed messianic armed rebellion is how you “meet the needs of a Jewish people under Roman occupation”? In general, this assertion that Rabbinic Judaism is what saved the Jews is dubious and self-serving propaganda by the Rabbinic Judaism. Bloom often defaults to the formulas because he heard the same propaganda all of us deed.
And there are the unintended consequences. Like the two millennia domination by the autistic and emotionally challenged men who are unable to make a wise decision not because of the lack of brainpower but because they got the autistic gift and rarely had the practical experience to test and fully understand the application of the abstract mental concepts. If there was a curse on our people there is non worse than this one.
Gone are the days when we measured up to the flawed sinners like King David, or the prophets that Bloom describes as possessed with “bipolarity and psychosis”. Today’s heroes are not even allowed to be wrong in the family squabbles… They are not allowed to be human or alive for that matter. Hell, some of them are not even allowed to be dead.
Fast-forward from Rabbi Akiva, to the reflected shadow of Christianity. I don’t mean literally, “ad mosay!” But if you take a Christian saint, they are dead when they are still alive. When a Christian Saint dies, not to mention Jesus, they assume a more natural state. Since these saints are angels, even Gods, there is no contradiction for them being dead while alive and alive while dead.
They are like profoundly boring parts of Torah written by the priestly apparatchiks whose only concern was that people bring them the choice cuts of meat. No playfulness or captivating tensions, no existential dread, no inner dilemmas or human faults, no poetic creativity only the prompt business of the roasted meat, sweet fruit and the fragrant bread. I know that you understand what I mean, despite some metaphorical confusion.
One more thing, erasing communism, Holocaust, Gulag, and history of your family is like throwing away Genesis and pretending the Torah is still intact. Enjoy the cold cuts. Let’s erase any real and horrible experience of our lives and substitute it with the eternal abstractions. Only if you must, Rabbi Akiva.
Harold Bloom on Gershom Sholem
Harold Bloom with the special tribute to Sholem:
How do you listen for a silence? Here is one of my personal mentors, the great Gershom Scholem, in his diary for 1918: “As long as silence remains intact, people and things will mourn. For our hope in the restitution of language and the reconciliation relies precisely on the conviction that while language suffered because of the Fall, silence did not.”
As the wise Scholem knew, that is a Gnostic formulation. I recall that in 1980, in Jerusalem, he told me that Kabbalah was the oldest of speculations. When I replied very gently that Kabbalah was an amalgam of Neoplatonism and various Gnostic traditions, the magisterial Scholem dismissed that by saying that Plato derived his doctrines from the Egyptians, who borrowed them from the Hebrews, and that Gnosticism began as a Jewish protest against God for having permitted the fall of Jerusalem. One did not argue with Scholem. He was in his early eighties, and his convictions were absolute. Instead, one learned to listen intently”
Bloom here writes that he will not argue with Sholem but elsewhere in the book he writes that the three Jewish giants Hans Jonas, Harold Bloom and Gershom Sholem spoke about this when they were in the same room. I can only imagine. In our generation there was only one man who was comparable to the three if not greater, Michael Schneider, and he died two years ago.
I remember Gnosticism was ascribed to Zoroastrians because of the “dualism” which is a minor point, actually. But then you have the documents, ksovim discovered in Nag Hamadi Geniza. And you read the Secret Book of John for example and there is a Christian wrapper to make it Christian, i.e., Jesus appears in the Temple in the beginning, Jesus went in the end, etc. However, the actual text in the middle was clearly Aramaic before translation to Coptic. Like the actual name of the Demiurge is Yaldabaoth, and the text is what I would describe as hyper kabbalistic. That’s written sometimes around or after Rabbi Akiva or Rabbi Shimon for that matter, give or take a hundred years.