The Ritual of New Creation (40 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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Page 140
Freud, then Jewish-American
culture
is still a culture of exile, and I see little reason to either hope for or to expect a change.
Once again, Nathan Zuckerman comes to mind, this time in
The Counterlife
. Having faced the lunacy of his brother's conversion to right-wing Zionism in Israel and the ugliness of his in-laws' anti-Semitism in England, Zuckerman is urging Maria, his pregnant wife, to return to him. If their child turns out to be a boy, he wants to have a
bris,
because
Circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not inalso that you're mine and not theirs. There is no way around it: you enter history through my history and me. Circumcision is everything that the pastoral is not and, to my mind, reinforces what the world is about, which isn't strifeless unity. Quite convincingly, circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living "naturally," unencumbered by man-made ritual. To be born is to lose all that. The heavy hand of human values falls upon you right at the start, marking your genitals as its own. Inasmuch as one invents one's meanings, along with impersonating one's selves, this is the meaning I propose for that rite.
23
This is genuine modern midrash, as clear an example of the ritual of new creation as I can offer. Compelled to meditate upon the ancient rite, Zuckerman finds new meaning that is commensurate with the circumstances of his ceaselessly destabilized existence. As he observes from the vantage point in the home of the pastoral,
Circumcision confirms that there is an us, and an us that isn't solely him and me. England's made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.
24
I am not at all sure that I understand what Roth, after such an immersion in history and tradition, really means by a Jew who is just the object itself," but I still find this passage immensely appealing. It may well serve as a model for Jewish literature for some time to come.
 
Page 141
Notes
Introduction
1. Harold Bloom, "Introduction,"
Musical Variations On Jewish Thought,
by Olivier Revault D'Allonnes (New York: George Braziller, 1984), 30.
2. Harold Bloom,
Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 320.
3. Gershom Scholem, "Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism," in
The Messianic Idea in Judaism
(New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 289.
4. Edmond Jabès, "The Key," in
Midrash and Literature,
ed. by Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sandford Budick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 352.
5. Walter Benjamin,
Illuminations,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 139.
6. Gershom Scholem,
On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism,
trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 126.
7. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,
Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 101.
8.
The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 19141923,
ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 202203.
9. Harold Bloom,
Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 172.
10. Ibid., 4.
11. George Steiner,
Real Presences
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 4.
12. Ibid., 134.

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