The Ritual of New Creation (25 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation
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Page 88
Just as the Jewish soul in exile will never find rest, so too its text will never be made whole. But Chelmitesand here their foolishness is indeed debatableseem not to mind, for they are used to minor verbal miracles: "The men of Chelm do not despair: / they lift their lances in the air / and leave them there" (11).
In their textual exile, the men of Chelm can also take solace in a greater miracle: the appearance among them of the Perfect Woman. The singular muse of
Chelmaxioms,
the Perfect Woman is also a lovely foil to the men of Chelm, who, divided into eleven pedantic tribes (spinozists, kabalists, metamorphosists, ecclesiastesists, etc.), spend their time in endless dispute. Intellectually equal to the men (one important section of the poem is devoted to her reading of a page of Kant), but infinitely more graceful, she is Mandelbaum's figure of the Shekhinah, the kabbalistic emanation of divinity known as the "Bride of God," about whom numerous myths, traditions, and rituals have developed.
16
Associated with Israel in its condition of exile, the Shekhinah is also the Sabbath Queen, for on the Sabbath God and Israel are united, providing a foretaste of messianic redemption and cosmic union. One of the most beautiful lyrics in
Chelmaxioms
celebrates her coming to Chelm:
A port beyond our portulans,
a bay too brilliant for man,
where light alone can dwell:
from that elusive harbor
the Sabbath Queen sets sail
and reaches usalways as dusk
would touch the patient foothills
some three days after she began
her journey out of speechlessness,
her pilgrimage to Chelm. (43)
In Mandelbaum's version of the myth, the Sabbath Queen sails from a realm of divine "speechlessness" to Chelm, the all-too-human town of endless verbiage. This speechlessness, however, is not to be understood as silence. Just as the divine point of origin is a light "too brilliant for man," it is also an absolute word, incomprehensible to us in our fallen human state. As Gershom Scholem observes:
This absolute word is originally communicated in its limitless fullness, butthis communication is incomprehensible! It is
 
Page 89
not a communication which provides comprehension; being basically nothing but the expression of essence, it becomes a comprehensible communication only when it is mediated.
17
It is through such mediation, the endless process of commentary, that the men of Chelm feel closest to the divine, but also grow most weary of study and argument. Thus the weekly journey of the Sabbath Queen produces "the anxiousness, / the everlasting labor, / the mourning her departure, / the six days waiting for her" (44).
This anxiousness, of course, is both intellectual and erotic, given the alluring beauty of the Shekhinah and the severe devotion to study of the patriarchs of Chelm. Later in the poem, in "The Lied of Long Since," the scholar wandering in the textual forest outside the walls of Chelm comes upon the Perfect Woman:
and when he heard her voice that used
the parts of speech as plants have used
the water and the air,
converting themdull elements
and colorlessto living fare,
he veered about and south with her
let distraught Delirium
await some other son of Chelm
to share oblique soliloquies
along woodways and cryptic leagues. (109)
"Because she is mute," says Walter Benjamin, "nature mourns." The Perfect Woman returns language to a kind of natural grace, the prelapsarian condition of the Divine speaking through nature. Offering erotic freedom and linguistic case unknown to the sons of Chelm, she lures them away from their delirious pedantry. In "The Lied of Yet" she is seen offering comfort to scholars throughout the town, "but she is wan / within the alleyways of Chelm." ''She needs a hearth to keep her warm / but not a charnel house" (124), and so she departs, leaving only memories and, in one of the "Aftersongs," the scholars' vain search for her name.
Are we to believe then that Chelm is world of dead language, and the textual devotion of the Diaspora nothing but vanity? Does obsession with the word lose us the world? In
Chelmaxioms,
this is itself the subject of dispute. With the loss of the Perfect Woman still in mind, here is one side of the argument:

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