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PDF FormatThe Hasidic tales borrowed from whatever materials were available: From the talmudic and midrashic legends, from the Zohar, from the Lurianic writings and from Jewish and non-Jewish folktales. No story was so profane (not even a pornographic one from the Decameron by Boccaccio) that it could not be transformed into a Hasidic tale. Indeed, the Hasidic idea of “sanctification of the story” encouraged the followers of that movement to take stories that were as “impure” as possible and redeem them by turning them into legends of the Hasidic masters. The greater the impurity, the greater the tikun effected by its Hasidic rewriting. Stories were seen by these authors not merely as entertainment, nor even solely for their didactic value, but as tools for “sifting out the holy sparks from the shells,” for restoring the cosmos to its primal wholeness.53 “We heard from the Ba’al Shem Tov that the great one of the generation is capable of elevating all the talk and the stories of the people of his generation, and thereby connecting the material with the spiritual,” relates one report, which appears in a collection of discourses attributed to the Ba’al Shem Tov.54 And in the introduction to the book of stories of R. Nahman of Bratslav, his disciple, R. Natan of Nemirov, writes:
In the books of tales that the world tells are many hidden things, and very lofty things, but the stories were ruined, because they lacked much, and they also were confused.... But in truth, the stories that are told by the world contain hidden within them very great matters. The Ba’al Shem Tov was capable, by means of stories, of effecting divine unions. When he saw that the upper channels had become ruined, and they could not be corrected by prayer, he would correct and unify them by telling a story.
In the history of Judaism, the telling of stories has never occupied so important a position as it did for the Hasidim. In the Bible, the Talmud, the Zohar and the Lurianic Kabala, the choice of narrative prose implied a certain worldview; in Hasidism this connection was made explicit. Thus it would be wrong to judge Hasidic storytelling as a weak link in the chain of Hebrew literature. To conceive of the Hebrew literary form as having started at its peak, with the tremendous achievement of the Bible, and then gradually declining to the nadir of unpolished Hasidic tales carelessly lifted from external sources, would be to ignore the literary dynamic that reached its climax in Hasidic literature. What began with the Bible’s strategic choice of one medium over another for the expression of its worldview would, by the time of Hasidism, turn the medium itself into part of the message, elevating it to the point that the act of creating it became a kind of religious fulfillment in its own right. The definition of Jewish identity and the fulfillment of the Jewish “mission” in the world, by means of literary narratives, would reach their full maturation in Hasidism. This point is illustrated by the following story about the Ba’al Shem Tov, from the famous anthology Shivhei Habesht:
I heard the following from R. Shimshon, the rabbi of the holy community of Raszkow, the son of the rabbi of the holy community of Polonnoye. Once there was a man who was called R. Adam. He was the one from whom the Ba’al Shem Tov received the manuscripts. R. Adam had found these manuscripts containing hidden secrets of the Tora in a cave....
R. Adam prepared a dream-question: To whom should he hand down his manuscripts? He was told to hand them down to R. Israel ben Eliezer of the city of Okopy. Before his death he commanded his only son: “I have manuscripts here which hold the secrets of the Tora.... Search for the city called Okopy and there you will find a man whose name is Israel ben Eliezer [i.e., the Ba’al Shem Tov]. He is about fourteen years old. You will hand him the manuscripts for they belong to the root of his soul. If you will be fortunate enough to study with him, then so much the better....”
After his wedding he [the son of the rabbi] began to search for the man that he was seeking. But he found only Israel, who was an attendant in the beit hamidrash [in the city of Okopy].... Once, at night, when everyone was asleep, R. Adam’s son pretended that he also was asleep. He watched the Ba’al Shem Tov rise and study and pray at his customary place. He observed this happening once and then again. During the third night, while standing and studying, the Ba’al Shem Tov fell asleep. The son of R. Adam got up and took one folio of the manuscripts, put it before the Ba’al Shem Tov, and then again pretended to be asleep. When the Ba’al Shem Tov woke up and saw the folio in front of him, he was deeply stirred. He studied it and then concealed it in the inner fold of his garment.
The son of R. Adam did the same thing again during the following night, until he had made certain that this was the man to whom his father had commanded him to hand over the manuscripts.55
In terms of poetics, this is Hebrew literature as we have come to know it: Compressed action, without sensual description or lengthy dialogue, related by an impersonal narrator (“I heard the following from R. Shimshon,” he informs us at the beginning, freeing himself from personal involvement in the story), and containing motifs drawn from the Bible (the selection of a spiritual successor rather than a hereditary one), from the Talmud (the adoration of the written text) and from the Zohar (the cave motif). Once again, as is the pattern in Hebrew narrative from the Bible to the Zohar, we are presented with a story that is merely a reworking of an existing narrative—in this instance, a popular folktale.56
More than two thousand years passed from the sealing of the biblical canon to the advent of Hasidism, and yet during this entire period, Hebrew literature remained faithful to its poetic principles. Despite all the differences between the biblical narrative and the Hasidic story, the basic elements of Hebrew literature continued to thrive in disparate lands and throughout entire eras of Jewish history. Until the twentieth century.
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Almost none of the literature written in the Hebrew language in the twentieth century retained the Hebrew poetics. Modern Hebrew-language literature does not meet any of the criteria of historical, national, deed-based narrative prose: It is not historical, but perceives time as immersed in the present; it is not national, but individualistic in content; and it is not active, but descriptive and analytical. The impersonal, authoritative and omniscient narrator has been abandoned in favor of an individual, limited and generally confused one; and the multi-generational language, with all its resonance from the past, has been abandoned in favor of language that represents the immediate experience of the present.
The only significant exception is S.Y. Agnon. Agnon was the only author writing in the Hebrew language in the twentieth century who produced anything that can properly be called “Hebrew” literature. To be sure, a distinction must be drawn between Agnon’s early, exploratory works and his mature writings. His early stories (“Miriam’s Well,” 1909; “Tishrei,” 1911; “Nights,” 1913) were intimate, psychological and impressionistic love stories that were influenced by the lyric, sorrowful, decadent Viennese and Scandinavian style that was in vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century. The prose of the young Agnon was not fundamentally different from the delicate, “alienated” writing of Uri Nissan Gnessin and Gershon Shofman, or of Jacob Steinberg and David Vogel, who made their contribution to literature in the 1920s and 1930s. Agnon realized the possibilities latent in this type of writing to an impressive degree, but less than three years were to pass from the time he began publishing before he apparently came to feel that he had exhausted the possibilities inherent in this style. The novella And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1912) was a turning point from fashionable impressionistic poetics to a distinctly Hebrew style. From then on, Agnon would return only rarely to writing stories of the type with which he inaugurated his literary career (“Other Faces,” 1932; “The Doctor’s Divorce,” 1941; “Fernheim,” 1949; “Betrothed,” 1943), while the bulk of his literary energies would be devoted to developing his distinctly Hebrew poetics.
