Midrash & Modernity

Women in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt, Agnes Heller, Eveline Goodman-Thau

In memory of the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt
100 Years 1906-2006

100 years might have seem rather insignificant to the Greek historians and the Jewish saints, no less to St. Augustine, Kant or Hegel who counted in the hundreds and the thousands before the advent of pocket-size machines that could perform advanced operations on the tens and hundreds of ciphers. For us those interesting artifacts seem to have a lot less relevance when it comes to speaking about our history; thereby we cannot speak of the world as we knew it, because we did not and rather say that such and such was the world as they knew it - speaking of Moses or Duns Scotus, of Hildegard Von Bingen or Spinoza.

To us some hundred years represent the advent of our world, one so terribly original and authentic that has no referential point to anything else, a world that in its comfortable double-seating stands alone and strayed from all possible worlds before and after, not because it is actually a palace of wonders but because altogether with the most remarkable achievements of mankind also contains the most unremarkably broken promises. We do not dare to call ourselves modern, because so did the Greeks in times of Pericles and the Encyclopedists. We go by the alias of "Sons of the Modern Age", just like some others before us went by "Sons of Israel" or "Daughters of Benedict". No matter who you are, it is important to have a father, isn't it? Even if his birth-control methods bewilder the most innocent eye and irresponsibly gives birth -and takes pride in the pangs of birth, to the murderer and the saint, to loving husband and respectable citizen who does not oppose dictatorship and terror or to animal-rights activists who do not hold a grudge before depraved governments and bureaucratic injustice. A father cannot be denied, not even if he has no second name of noble origin and as a first name he bears the generic one of "Modernity".

No doubt he is an open-minded father, who granted us deliverance from church and monarch alike, set us free. So free that even God is himself free of all liability. That, of course when one does not take notice of the old crowd of unbelievers and heretics replaced by the theologians claiming that God is dead. This free world was the one Hannah Arendt described with the old Chinese adage, "Interesting times are always a curse". The advent of the technological imagination shares a throne with genocide, the cure for malaria with the widespread of AIDS and equal-opportunity education with global hunger; no world more interesting than this, it is a fact. Once released from dead old God we bear all the responsibility upon our shoulders; like that Polish rabbi who scorned his son for mocking the heretic of the village who smoked on the Day of the Atonement and rode on the Shabbat. "Those who deliver themselves from God are the real heroes of the world, because they are themselves alone responsible for all suffering and joy". The prophet Jeremiah warns us that if we do not receive freedom by listening to the word of God, then we will receive it, yes, by sword, by famine, by hunger, by devastation, in the hands of the Kingdoms of the earth. Perhaps that was the freedom we received as a free gift from nowhere in the last hundred years that have fastened their pace more than any billion of years but have witnessed more changes and revolutions and horrors than any other century.

Another prophecy by Isaiah says that the Lord will release the captives and the heart-broken and will set them free with a "total opening of the eyes" and Hesiod foresaw that "in the end of times children will be born with their eyes wide-open". This openness can be at times so bright as to cause one blindness -none of the Israelites could bear the presence of the "light" amidst their midst, not being sure at all whether it is a curse or a blessing. The mystery of blindness permeates the earliest memories of humankind: The rabbi who put his eyes out of the sockets to avoid the temptation of Satan in the guise of a woman, in the Biblical story of Lot the men of Sodom gathered before the gates of the house pursuing the angels and "they struck the men who were at the door of the house, young and old, with blindness so that they could not find the door"; the miracle of Jesus healing the blindness of an old man or the cycle of Oedipus in the Greek tragedy. In the Greek world Eros -God of Love, was the first-born Light that is responsible for the coming into being and ordering of all things in the cosmos and is often shown blind or blindfolded; he was also called ελευτεριος (eleutherios), "the liberator". The poetess Sappho often described him as "bittersweet" and "cruel".

Now Eros shakes my soul,
A wind on the mountain falling on the oaks (Sappho)

The Book of Deuteronomy reads "The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindess and confusion of mind". It is this madness in fact what best characterizes our world,
an Exodus from the philosopher's explanations of the world and truth to the truths and revelations of the prophet; the philosopher can no longer explain the world if he is not a prophet of some sort. A world in which we no longer make attempts at being civilized or enlightened, the major concern of this sombre age is "learning anew to be human". The last hundred years experienced the atomic explosion, the concentration camp, the technological imagination, totalitarian regimes swearing an oath to wipe out the earth at their will, environmental pollution, the liberalization of the sexes, and many other "constructions" in the social dynamics that claim an ancient past but are simply reactions at the root of modern man's discontent, the discontent with modernity which is in itself the most important creative driving force of modern man. Athens became arid and desolated and a sudden emigration forced the prophets into a state of permanent alert and no slumber, "for the guard of Israel will never sleep nor slumber", only taking into account Israel acquired a new father. The prophets awoke from their millenarian sleep and summoned the academics and the politicians and the citizens emulating Socratic discussions and summoning interlocutors! But most of their interlocutors soaked in the blood of the concentration camps and the revolutions, they fell into the oblivion triggered by the opportunist who can only find grace in another of his kind. It only took a hundred years for humans to do what God in a second did in the Midrash: "To create worlds and destroy them". But a hundred human years to a second of God? Perhaps this is actually the meaning of emancipation in the fuller sense; an ability to destroy.

All of us were born long after this happened, without enough time for a wink of the eye and a reminder of that world that was destroyed by the imagination of modern man, by modernity - the human condition of wanting to repair the frailty of the world by escaping the earth, by overcoming the human, the condition and the world. Perhaps believing we could be cured from the human condition in a past world or in a future world, but in the meantime not having any other one to live in. All this has been pondered in academic halls and newspapers and taxi cabs and supermarket lines, all this has been discussed and memorials erected and countries liberated, children adopted and opportunities given. Not all the promises of modernity have failed, perhaps only our expectations did. But our blindness remains.

That is where three Jewish women, contemporaries of one another have left us a message in the language of the prophets but with the words of the philosophers, those we can grasp in our limited imagination. These women were by no means philosophers voluntarily, in our generation one does not become a philosopher because he thinks he is servicing humankind with it. They do not want to proclaim a New Testament of Bible and philosophy to mend the modern world we received also by no means voluntarily. They do not write out of certainty or sureness of the self, it is completely unnecessary; they write out of moments of anger and despair that have no names -for in the Creation everything had a name, every creature was named by man. They are not rebelling against reason or trying to halt the crumbling structures of Athens. These women lived through persecutions and terror, regimes and smell the breath of death from close-by, it did by no means turn them into saintly martyrs or exemplary novelties from a paleontological collection at the museum of Western antiquity; but it gave them an obligation.

An obligation to understand, a task as instrumental as life itself, to understand not in order to provide the answers necessary to mend the world's frailty, but rather to understand that this frailty is what makes the world what it resembles now and that one must learn to live with the discontent, because if there is anybody at all who will write the next chapter of history that will follow modernity, it is certainly us. They have not come to cure us from our blindness, but to remind us it was once possible to speak and see. Not claiming a return to that world of the past, but to realize that the possibilities of humankind supersede and overcome ultimately the technological. They're teachers of the invisible, that which to us has become so detached and impossible; the utilitarian claim that only the tangible must be of any importance by which the technological imagination has replaced humanity with terror and humane behaviors by bureaucracy and despotism. One a political philosopher, the other a social philosopher and the third a religious philosopher.

The epicenter of their concerns is not simply philosophy or that new branch in the library's catalog called "Biblical thought", but unearthing the long-forgotten faculty of thinking which the inability to move among invisible space typical of the modern world, turned into ideology and philosophy. It is clear to most people to do that in order to act one must have an ideology or a philosophy, but what about thinking? Did we forget that the consequence of thinking are action and politics? Not the consequences of ideology and philosophy? That the world is something that must be loved instead of survived?

This is where their real worth is, their love's work is philosophy. The care of the irresponsible father was replaced by the guilt of the caring mother, one sin replaced by an epiphany. Philosophy more than anything else, even more than a desire and despair is an act of love; this notion being as old as both Plato and God. To love is always a dialectical damage, it might be merciful or it might be merciless. Yet this dialectical possibility is available only to the beloved, the newborn and the world. Not to the philosopher, who sees the fruits of his labor in the invisible structures built upon a world already old, they do not want to market any new commodities for ideas have existed for as long as humankind has. Philosophy is not a profession or an academic degree, it is what you realize you have when you journey along this Exodus: The realization of what you lack after you thought, then comes the desire; so said the poet Wallace Stevens: "The priest desires... the philosopher desires and not to have is the beginning of desire".

The work of love is the thinker's solitude -not his loneliness, in which the free beloved -the world, sees the light that blinds and the loving philosopher is bound to his condition. But as long as the thinker isn't lonely, as long as he can discuss and experience he can overcome even his own philosophy and throw himself into life even if that means death in earthly terms. The choice of philosophy is irreversible, and the struggle against the prophet runs along this thread. The philosopher is trying to unearthen the real world but the prophet is warning him that he won't be able to live in it. But the philosopher insists and he finds himself chained to the abyss, because the reafirmation of his individual freedom requires a source of truth, which to the philosopher is already impossible and in his interpretation of meaning he has died himself to life, but in that sense he's become deaf to the prophet therefore bound to see everything by himself without an audience, and in fact he's the real survivor.

To tell the work of Love is a metaphysics of the experience, in which the philosopher uncalls himself for his quest and in doing so experiences the negation that feeds him life. Midrash is the work of the lover and philosophy is the result of the beloved's care, of the beloved's ignorance and poignant questioning. The philosopher doesn't want to philosophize, but he's left with no other option. Because the beloved is not always present to construct together worlds anew to protect both from the mighty waters. The beloved is a free citizen and the philosopher is the slave. Philosophy is the prayer of Kafka, Benjamin and Arendt - attentiveness. The philosopher isn't satisfied with it, he wants to capture the photograph of our earthly life and redeem it before us. Freedom lives in a prayerless world, that the philosopher rejects. He wants lively discussions and dialogues, because he knows God created the world by acts of speech and not by translations, but he is unable to speak. In a sense he is only granted to love alone, and in doing so all philosophy is already antidemocratic and elitist. On account of that the philosopher wants to think, but he cannot do so alone therefore he calls upon himself the three freedoms; he envies the prophets. He needs the beloved to write the Midrash of Love, but the beloved doesn't need him because he's himself already free, therefore thoughtless, irresponsible and evil. The lover loves his evil because it reminds him of good, there's a presence but no real essence. The philosopher loves art because in Greek it is acting and creating, but he is unable to do so for as long as he is loving in philosophy, he must radically think instead. But it is this illusion of love what creates the narrative, the philosopher and the philosophy. This is the work of love, to unearthen language, as to be able to love not the beloved alone but in general. The beloved is jealous and chains himself to protect his love from the waters, he cheats Eve and turns all knowledge again into falsehood and deceive, by answering questions no one asked. The lover runs after the beloved in motionless silence, the beloved answers in impossibilities.

World and philosopher have chosen themselves for philosophy, the former criminally and the latter consequentially. Their love's work is writing the Midrash of Love which becomes impossible in translation, speech is necessary, but their love's work is in itself the Midrash of Love. Not only the political philosopher loved the world, also the social philosopher and the theologian love the world. Their words keep echoeing to us in the mouth of the poetess Zelda:

"Your flitting eyes-
Smal birds sipping nectar.

When you wept,
The King did not hear.

When you fell,
The world didn't revert
To void-and-chaos.

Mephiboshet, you dreamt
Of a more innocent friendship.

You abhorred the wisdom
Of the ancient serpent,

O son of Jonathan." (1977).