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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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Page 44
over. As we have observed, Bloom is no deconstructionist, but the wanderings of his revisionary system come as close to a deconstruction of Jewish tradition as one might have while still appropriating its salient features.
In
Kabbalah and Criticism,
Bloom makes the following comparison: "Like the Gnostics, the Kabbalists sought
knowledge,
but unlike the Gnostics they sought knowledge in the Book."
58
Mileur comments: "For Bloom, Kabbalism in its more orthodox aspect represents revisionism as the defense of tradition; in its more radical, Gnostic aspect, the Kabbalah represents an attempt to move beyond the tradition to envision something new, something elsewhere."
59
These two passages indicate the simultaneous attraction and repulsion in Bloom's relation to the tradition of Jewish textuality; indeed, he is so profoundly in the grip of these antithetical forces that he has made it an important part of his definition of Judaism. Bloom's Gnostic desire to be elsewhere (which he also sees as the founding desire of all poetry) always pulls him from the supposed continuity of tradition, but because he is wedded to the Book (as is all poetry), he can never truly depart. The result of this ambivalence is Bloom's search for gaps and contradictions, his fascination with the agon, his resistance to all forms of stability, and above all, his paradoxical longing for an authority that will never assert itself as a positive belief. David Biale explains why Scholem was attracted to Kabbalah:
The Kabbalah itself was an underground movement for revival in Jewish history; yet it accomplished its work by appropriating the normative tradition and transforming it. Because it represented "freedom under authority," the Kabbalah proposed bold and farreaching new interpretations of the tradition without destroying the tradition altogether.
60
Bloom begins where Scholem ends: Gnosticism, in the demonic purity of its self-knowledge, represents the final interpretive step that undoes all tradition. As I have argued, Bloom will never take that stepneither his audience nor his own critical voice will be transformed or end up "elsewhere"but instead, Judaism provides the site where Bloom's ambivalence toward the Book is endlessly rehearsed.
If this site appears to consist not solely of Jewish texts but of all textssince Bloom, beginning as a modest explicator of the British Romantics, now wanders endlessly among the genres and disciplinesit is because he has appropriated the most inventive and most
 
Page 45
powerful of Jewish interpretive processes and has "decentered" it to suit his own syncretic devices. Arguably, the rhetorical as well as psychohistorical rationale for Bloom's nomadic discourse is not only generally Jewish but specifically midrashic. The endless textual turnings of traditional writers of Midrash provide the critic with a way of moving between texts, for as Bloom himself observes, "Interpretation,
Midrash,
is a seeking for the Torah, but more in the mode of making the Torah larger than in opening it to the bitterness of experience."
61
Bloom is correct when he speaks of enlarging the Torah (or filling in its lacunae), but he is anxiously hedging in his resistance to "the bitterness of experience." "Midrash," according to Barry W. Holtz, ''arose as an attempt to keep a sense of continuity between the ancient tradition of the Bible and the new world of Hellenistic Judaism."
62
I would speculate that in a strangely parallel manner, Bloom's midrashic project arises as an attempt to keep a sense of continuity between the ancient tradition of humanism and the new world of Postmodern literary attitudes.
How is Bloom's work midrashic; and how does it allow for continuity, given the overt concern for rupture and crisis both in his own books and throughout contemporary literary theory? Born out of cultural anxiety and, (once again) as Bloom himself knows, partly derived from the alien Platonic tradition,
63
Oral Torah in its midrashic form operates out of a scrupulous textual anxiety as well. James L. Kugel explains:
a perceived contradiction between passages (for example, two slightly different versions of the same law), or a word that does not seem to fit properly in its context, or simply an unusual word, or an unusual spelling of a wordall of these are the sorts of irregularities which might cause the reader to trip and stumble as he walks along the biblical path; and so over such irregularities midrash builds a smoothing mound which both assures that the reader will not fall and, at the same time, embellishes the path with material taken from elsewhere and builds into it, as it were, an extra little lift.
64
The truth of the Law is thus to be found through elaborate verbal play; what initially appear to be problems in the text provide opportunities for greater religious insights. The sanction for what appears to modern readers as dizzying intertextuality is the Bible's status as a canonizedthat is, closedtext. Once more Kugel offers an analogy:
 
Page 46
The basic unit of the Bible, for the midrashist, is the verse: this is what he seeks to expound, and it might be said that there simply is no boundary encountered beyond that of the verse until one comes to the border of the canon itselfa situation analogous to certain political organizations in which there are no separate states, provinces, or the like but only the village and the Empire.
65
The free movement of the interpretation is circumscribed by canonic authority, a dialectical process that Scholem describes at length in "Revelation and Tradition." Successive generations transform Midrash into Torah; hence the famous Talmudic saying, "Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it."
But successive generations have also interpreted with progressively greater freedom; in Bloom's terms, participants in the Jewish tradition of commentary have had to become more and more extravagant revisionists. Drawing on Scholem, Bloom speaks of the classic textual dilemma facing the first medieval kabbalists:
How does one accommodate a fresh and vital new religious impulse, in a precarious and even catastrophic time of troubles, when one inherits a religious tradition already so rich and coherent that it allows very little room for fresh revelations or even speculations? The Kabbalists were in no position to formulate or even reformulate much of anything in their religion. Given to them already was not only a massive and completed Scripture, but an even more massive and intellectually finished structure of every kind of commentary and interpretation.
66
Thus arose the revisionary theosophical doctrines which culminate in the catastrophic vision of Isaac Luria, the messianic debacle of Sabbatai Sevi, and thence the popularization of Jewish mysticism in Hasidism. As relatively modern a figure as Nahman of Bratslav (17721810), who produced his teachings not only under the internal pressures of a tremendous interpretive tradition but under the increasing external pressures of secularization and the Enlightenment, reaches what his biographer considers an extreme in the freedom of his commentaries:
But in the extent to which he carries this process, Nahman seems to express a desire to extend this method to its breaking
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