Modern Mirrors

This essay was adapted from a book launch at the Hebrew University on May 22nd, 2024, and translated from the Hebrew by Amital Stern.

Deciding on a path to take in this review was rather challenging, due to the unusual richness of Yosefa Raz’s book. But while reading, I found that the questions that I wrestle with the most, questions that I believe Raz weaves through the book with great ingenuity, are, on the one hand, what Yosefa Raz means when she writes “the poetics of prophecy”, and, on the other hand, where she places herself in relation to the poetics of prophecy she writes about.

Therefore, what I will suggest here is not a dialogue with a particular theme in the book, but rather my attempt to decipher some sort of internal code that I believe I identified within it.

Initially, I interpreted this book as an analysis of a discourse, namely a study about the discourse about prophecy. In the introduction to her book, Raz herself explains, quoting Timothy Beal on Foucault, that “rather than thinking of ourselves as moderns who can disinterestedly examine a text from antiquity, we should instead think of “biblical texts, the Bible, and the biblical as discursive objects that are continually generated and regenerated within particular cultural contexts in relation to complex genealogies of meaning that are themselves culturally produced.”[i]

Moreover, “[i]n attending to the afterlives of biblical texts, or what has more recently been called ‘reception history,’” adds Raz, “our objects of study need to include our own assumptions and preconceptions which also comprise the vital afterlife of the text.”[ii]

We gather from here that more than she wants to say something about prophecy, Raz wants to convey something about the history of its reception, about the way modern poets, and perhaps moderns, in general, think about prophets and prophecy and incorporate that thought into their poetry, utilizing poetic language or the characters of prophets.

In fact, a good part of the book is dedicated precisely to this history of reception, of the way Romanticism transformed the nature of prophecy and turned it into a lost, coveted paradise revered by the moderns: an island of clarity, authority and stability, an island essentially conceived to define our distance from it – from prophecy –; conceived to prove how processes of secularization beat it further and further out of arm’s reach, essentially drowning it in an ocean of doubt, falsification and misunderstanding. This melancholy, after all, this desire to return to the lost past, to lost inspiration, remains our bread and butter long after Romanticism. Even more so when it comes to the subjects of Raz’s research – thinkers, scholars and poets alike, Jews and non-Jews, Zionists and even antisemites: all longing to return and bask in Moses’ “clear mirror” (aspaklaria me’irah), to exude Isaiah’s great charisma.

And on the other hand, everyone experiences some of the same frustration inherent to the Romantic frenzy for prophecy: the attempt to carve it anew from beneath the piles of later culture and discourse, and to fail each time, while maintaining a sense of grief, disappointment, and occasional wrath about the end of prophecy and a search for the guilty culprits.  Here we can include Wellhausen’s fury over the corruption of prophecy by the priests and Pharisees – the successors of the miserable conman Ezekiel, Ahad Ha-am’s sorrow that flickers in Jeremiah-like tantrums where Moses should have stood alone in all his glory, Baruch Kurzweil’s disappointment in Ahad Ha-am, who, in Kurzweil’s opinion, empties prophecy of meaning because he takes God out of the picture, and, of course, the national poet, Haim Nachman Bialik’s overflowing bitter cup.[iii] They all, somehow, at some point, imagined the prophet as a perfect, majestic figure whose face shines bright and clear, and as they begin to recreate this figure, to reconstruct it from the ruins, to resuscitate it, they discover that the dry bones have only partially materialized into flesh and blood, that this figure can’t actually stand on its own two feet, or, perhaps, that the stink of death continues to accompany this rebirth after all. In this way, Raz illustrates how the moderns, as if against their will and due to their own lack of talent, construct prophecy as something that never rises to the occasion, as a melancholic enterprise, a chronicle of failure with a loss of faith at its core.

These clumsy modern attempts to depict or revive prophecy closely correspond to the Jamesian perception of religion. Religious conversion, so William James taught us, is supposed to heal the divided, flawed, morally unstable, inferior, unhappy self, elevate its conscience and lift its mood, all thanks to a solid grasp on faith.[iv] But if we keep believing, like faithful Lutherans, that only faith can create this healing, and, at the same time, admit the truth that we have lost this faith and it will never return, then this long-awaited healing will likely remain an unattainable commodity to us moderns. That is to say that it is impossible to detach the image of Eden from the image of its loss – they are simply entwined together. Prophecy, in this sense, is lost forever, and this book, accordingly, deals with a depressed and even, perhaps, slightly pathetic enterprise of a modern return that never succeeds.

On second glance, however, it is difficult to say that Raz lingers in these spaces of analyzing the discourse and history of the reception of prophecy in the modern era. The book bears the striking and multifaceted title “The Poetics of Prophecy”, and this title does not only bring to mind an elegy for a lost imaginary, for a poetics clinging to an object that does not exist outside of it, but for prophecy, one that contains poetics. Raz, then, writes about prophecy itself – not the construction of prophecy and not the reception of prophecy, but prophecy proper, the kind that finds expression in poetry and other writing – essay writing, academic writing – and I will delve into this in detail, below.

How does Raz move from “representations of poetry in prophecy” or from the discourse on prophecy, to prophecy itself? The analysis of the discourse on prophecy in modern literature and poetry is still, even after Foucault, ostensibly bound to the idea that it is possible to separate the object of “prophecy” from the discourse about it or its reception. The gap between what is received and the mirror (aspaklaria) through which it is reflected allows us to say something about reception's distinctive nature in a particular time period or community. And precisely because of the attempt to skip from the cultural construct of the object itself to the lost source, Raz joins the justified and well-established criticism of the Romantics and their heirs’ (meaning, our) stubborn attempts to excavate prophecy from beneath culture, as if it were an archeological exhibit, an object that can be examined in a sterile manner, in a laboratory setting, where the researchers do not interrupt the flow of the experiment. What can even be said about prophecy “itself” if we are captive to the discourse?

I believe that it is possible to identify two arguments in the book that grapple with this issue.

The first argument is Raz’s refreshing claim that the failures of these same restorative poetic projects—'which hope to revive ancient prophecy from its ruins in order to instill life into modernity, only in order to be disappointed, once again, in face of loss- are not, in fact, failures at all. On the contrary: these failures are actually the most loyal representations of prophecy. We see this precisely as Jeremiah tries, in vain, to conjure Moses and Samuel, only to get the cold shoulder from God: “my heart is not inclined to this people,”[v]or, according to Maurice Blanchot, as he is quoted in the introduction, the voice of prophecy is heard “where catastrophe hesitates to turn into salvation.”[vi]

In other words, Raz claims that these failures don’t testify to the gap between the failed, straggling modernists and the potent prophets in all their glory, but rather to the opposite – the prophets are, how shall I put it, no small losers themselves: stammering, incompetent, passive, doubt-ridden, idiosyncratic, uncharismatic rejects.

In other words, while modernists believe that the mirror in which the prophets are reflected to them is obscure, stained, scratched, or even fragmented, these flaws exist not on the mirror at all, but on the prophets themselves, who are scratched, stained, or broken. On the contrary, not only modern readers, but also the great prophets themselves are to blame for these weaknesses that find their way into the nostalgic embrace between the two. This, then, is the middle ground between new and old, between post-Enlightenment poets and the ancient prophets who love them back – a sad, weak love based on loss.

The second argument stems from the first one, and is present throughout the book, even if Raz only fully formulates it in the afterward. She contends that the modern writers that she explores – Bialik, who curses the day he was born as national poet, rarely writes poetry and scatters his exhortations to the wind, or Wellhausen, the pre-eminent biblical scholar who loathes his role as a theology professor because he trains his students to be terrible spiritual shepherds – in fact understand the early prophets in those very areas the modern writers feel they can’t reach, in other words, in their weakness. The modern mirror is a clear one, in which the figure of the prophet is clearly reflected, “like a face in the water.”[vii] And if these poets, the flawed moderns, accurately mirror the prophets precisely because the poets are just as flawed as the prophets, then the moderns themselves, with their fragility and helplessness, are, as the Talmud puts it, if not prophets, then “sons of prophets,”[viii] and prophecy, for them, is not just an object of longing or an archeological exhibit, but it actually exists within them, whether they acknowledge it or not.  The dynamics of biblical prophecy can be viewed through the lens of  the history of reception – the reception of the prophetic message, which travels through a variety of upheavals and disruptions before reaching the prophets' consciousness and, more significantly, before reaching the text – to the point that it is difficult to categorically pinpoint what remains of the “original”, of the “source” (is there even a “source”?), when it is refracted through the prophetic prism. Thus, Raz narrows the gap between the discourse on prophecy and prophecy itself, because this broken discussion on prophets and prophecy, a discussion that echoes something remote and only fragmentally comprehendible, appears to be a fundamentally broken medium.

In her afterward, Raz claims that the moderns – including those of us who live in the afterlife of the now dead and dishonorably buried modern era – actually prophesy out of fragility and weakness, within uncertainty, haziness, disgust and even horror.

Raz summons two female prophets, Anne Carson and M. NourbeSe Philip, to testify. She describes how Carson extracts a raw howl from the throat of Isaiah, who is heartbroken over his frustrating relationship with God, and his own somewhat romantic need to try and rekindle this relationship, as in the old days. Moreover, milk begins to spurt out of his – or her – breasts, reminiscent of Jesus of the Middle Ages, as he is depicted in Caroline Bynum’s work, a Jesus who nourishes the entire world from the blood and milk that spill from his broken body.[ix]

On the other hand, Philip, the second female prophet, poeticizes the terrible tale of the slave ship Zong, from which 150 slaves were cast into the sea in the late 1700s, in attempt to obtain insurance damages for the ship owner's loss of commodities. Philip, writes Raz, slashes the English language as if to avenge the slaves’ blood spilled in the sea.[x] A prophetess of disgust and abomination, Philip revives their wet, not dry, bones from the bottom of the ocean, and thus, writes Raz, she is able to redeem the past, along with the future. These prophecies, prophecies of broken bodies, of disjointed, distant and tarnished bones, that have never and may never fuse together, lacking language or constructed of only language fragments, have already relinquished the romantic ideal of return and have offered a kind of conversion that is inverse to the Jamesian one, a conversion from the fused to the dismantled, conflicted, and out of control.

In other words, Raz is not, in fact, writing about the history of reception, but about the history of prophecy. But actually, she is not really writing about history at all, and what remains of my line of questioning is: in what way does Raz’s experiment demand participation? In other words, is it possible to abandon the word “about” entirely when we claim that Raz is writing about prophecy? Within the complex relationship between writing about prophecy and prophecy itself, which grows alternately closer and farther away, one wonders where writing about writing about prophecy, in other words – the writing of Yosefa Raz -- stands. What, in fact, is going through the mind of this woman, whose name is linked to that of Joseph, the biblical prophetic dreamer, while also transforming it, perhaps similar to how Carson transforms Isaiah? What is Yosefa Raz doing when she speaks of prophecy in this way, when she fuses poetry, scripture and secular writing, essay and academic research, when she blends old and new, past and future, until the compass spins out of control and the ice shatters into tiny pieces? Can our literary research, and our academic research in general - a broken mirror in every respect, inherently infected with a series of irreparable romantic problems – be, at certain moments, from a certain angle, a poetics of prophecy itself?

In a strange coincidence, in the last paragraph of her book, before signing off with the words “Ein Karem, May 29th, 2021,” making sure to add the Hebrew date, 14 Sivan, 5781, Raz unexpectedly incorporates something from the present moment into her epilogue.

As fate would have it, that present moment, May 2021, was during “Operation Guardian of the Walls”, a military campaign in Gaza. When I read the sentence about shelling in Gaza, I found myself suddenly confused – the sentence made it difficult for me to locate myself in time. It was unlikely, after all, that Raz wrote this book over the past six months, and what is all this talk about what is happening in Gaza without mentioning October 7th and all the other coordinates that characterize our current emerging discourse? It took me a moment to understand that the person speaking to me now is not Raz of “Iron Swords” (the Israeli name of the Hamas-Israel war that began in October 7th, 2023), but Raz of “Operation Guardian of the Walls.” In other words, it turns out that in the book’s last paragraph (and my apologies for the spoiler, of course), Raz dispatches a poetic call right into the catastrophic present in which we are currently living, at the end of May 2024, when the world as a whole is experienced as a broken, shattered mirror of the past, and our spirits are filled with prophecies of rage and devastation, “as a pomegranate is full of seeds.”[xi]

Instead of “the spell of strong prophecy in scholarship and poetry,״ writes Raz, “I suggest the difficult but also generative and even healing potentialities of weak prophecy. Rather than anxiously shoring up an oppressive certainty or nostalgically longing for the authoritative conviction of the past, weak prophecy embraces doubt and instability in the face of the vicissitudes of catastrophe.[xii]

Embracing doubt and instability in face of the vicissitudes of catastrophe – that, in my eyes, is a prophecy of consolation.

[i] Timothy Beal, “Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures.” Biblical Interpretation 19, nos. 4-5 (2011), 371 in Yosefa Raz, The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, 12.

[ii] Raz, The Poetics of Prophecy, 12.

[iii] Ibid,, “Haim Nahman Bialik: The National Poet’s Cup of Sorrows”, 152-173.

[iv] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Edited by Matthew Bradley. Oxford World’s Classics. London: Oxford University Press, 2012. 

[v] Jeremiah 15:1.

[vi] Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press, 2002, 81 in Raz, p. 19.

[vii] Proverbs 27:19.

[viii] Pesachim 66a.

[ix] Caroline Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Oakland: University of California Press, 1982.

[x] Raz, p. 189.

[xi] Paraphrase of Hagigah 27a.

[xii] Raz, p.191.