Weak Prophecy As A Critique of Just-So Secularization Stories

Yosefa Raz’s new book, The Poetics of Prophecy, is about reception history, so I will start with an anecdote about the book’s own (nascent) reception. I recommended Yosefa’s book to a brilliant graduate student of mine, Krista Muratore, who is working on William Blake. After reading it, Krista related, she told a friend that the book helped her understand her own desire to imitate biblical (and other) prophets in writing literary criticism. The friend recoiled at that suggestion. After all, the friend thought, a critic has to be skeptical, ironic, and self-conscious, whereas a prophet has a dangerous confidence in their proximity to divinity. A prophet was the furthest possible thing from a secular writer. Raz’s book takes aim at precisely Krista’s friend’s dichotomy, in which the ancient, religious source, which is understood to be authoritative, muscularly assertive, and second only to God is opposed to modern, secular poetry, characterized as self-conscious instead of self-assured and constantly hedging the bombastic claims of the primitive, prophetic original. As an alternative, Raz explores what she calls “weak prophecy,” emphasizing the ways in which biblical prophecy is tentative and confused, marred by failure and anxiety—hardly authoritative in any straightforward way.

My student’s friend’s response testifies to the widespread, reflexive nature of this distinction and thus to the usefulness of Raz’s book, which offers two central correctives. First, she argues that this distinction is not a historical shift from one sort of texts to another, but rather as a persistent, transhistorical tension, found both in biblical prophecies like Isaiah and Ezekiel and in modern poetry like Blake’s or Hayim Nahman Bialik’s. Second, she shows us how this distinction is made. For instance, the book begins with the eighteenth-century English bishop and scholar Robert Lowth, famous for his classic treatment of parallelism in biblical poetry. Raz argues that Lowth, anxious about “vulgar prophetic enthusiasm,” which “unsupervised, could ignite social revolution” (47), invents a newly systematic discipline of biblical poetics, simultaneously making space for and containing the violent intensity of the biblical text in the literary category of “sublimity.” In the process, he also fashions new, aesthetic tools with which to fix, or touch up embarrassing cruxes in prophetic texts—so, for instance, Isaiah 6’s notorious commission, in which the prophet is perplexingly directed by God to impede the Israelites’ understanding, is now interpreted as “hyperbolic rhetoric,” what Lowth calls “the sublime air of poetry” (45). The Enlightenment scholar thus airbrushes the contradictions and subversive potential in the biblical text, constructing what Raz calls an image of “strong” prophecy, which is divinely assured, coherent, and uncritical. Yet, as Raz astutely shows, Lowth also helps undermine the stuffy, conservative rules of neoclassical English poetry. While William Blake revolts against Lowth’s apolitical sublimity, he rescues from Lowth’s Isaiah “fissures and glitches that can be exploited for a fundamental, unsettling openness” (55), a radical counter-model of an indeterminate, revelatory art.

Raz’s beautiful reading, which I am slightly butchering through compression, suggests that we must not counterpose a pious prophecy (Isaiah), defined by “authority, strength, and power” (55), to a diabolic poetry (Blake), defined by open-ended questioning and uncertainty. We are witnessing not an opposition between the ancient sacred and the modern secular, but two currents in post-Enlightenment culture: a scholarly attempt to “define and fix” an idealized model of prophecy, and a poetic “countertradition” drawn to the biblical texts’ “failure and weakness” (9). And crucially, both of these currents are drawing on Isaiah itself, which moves between authoritative discourse and “prophetic weakness” (21). What is often understood as a historical transformation (from Isaiah to Blake) is read instead as a tension immanent to the biblical text, which is then distributed between two fields of modern discourse, one of which (biblical philology) represents itself as recovering the ancient meaning, and the other of which (Romantic and post-Romantic poetry) understands itself as creating de novo. The historical development is not a shift from religious to secular, prophetic to poetic, but rather the transformation of conflicted, internally divided texts into polarized, distinctive modes of discursive production.

Versions of this argument recur throughout the book, which covers an incredibly capacious archive: biblical texts, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biblical scholarship, Romantic literature in English and German, classic Zionist writing, and contemporary poetry. This capaciousness reflects, I think, something she and I share from our training in a nexus of English, Jewish studies, and comparative literature at Berkeley, by a cohort of scholars who were commendably casual about specialized periods. Our teachers’ work ranged from the Septuagint to Elie Wiesel, the Talmud to Bertha Pappenheim, or biblical narrative to Yehuda Amichai. By contrast, when one joins the guilds that study specifically, for instance, the Bible, Romanticism, or modern Israeli poetry, one often receives, as a free but dubious gift, pieces of unexamined conceptual armature, intellectual furniture so naturally commodious it gives the impression of being already built-in to the world. The supposed opposition between prophet and critic is one example. Another would be the disciplinary tendency of biblical philology to fix scriptural texts, to make them make sense, surely an understandable goal, but one which, Raz shows, often bulldozes over Jeremiah’s monstrous eruptions of the inexplicable or to fill in the fissures, crevasses, and caverns in the text of Ezekiel. Against this levelling, consolidating agenda, Raz offers a twist on the hallowed philological principle, what I would call lex difficilior debilior—a sense that the difficult reading has a salutary weakness, a heightened attention to how and why the crooked places were made straight, and what was lost in the rectification.

The straightening work that Raz’s book finally resists is that of Zionism. If Lowth, Goethe, Carlyle and so on produced a fictitious image of the strong, authoritative prophet, in the writing of the cultural Zionist critic Ahad Ha’am and then Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik, that image became mobilized as “nationalist fantasy,” a model of leadership as masculine persuasive force, enlisted rhetorically to stir the Jewish people toward a new collective coherence and an active role in history. Criticism of Zionist literature typically postulates this model as a norm. Thus, Ahad Ha’am is often celebrated as a modern-day Moses (in whose image he consciously fashioned himself), and moments of doubt, prophetic fumbling, or national disintegration are seen as failures. Similarly, Bialik’s great poem about the Kishinev pogrom, “City of Slaughter,” is lauded as a secular departure from the impotent providentialism of traditional Ashkenazic poems of lament. In this narrative, Bialik and other secular, Zionist poets are doomed to be “prophets walking on thin ice, always in danger of falling into the abyss” because they lack the ancient grounding of a divine guarantee. By contrast, Raz emphasizes that the doubt, uncertainty, and existential instability of a poem like “City of Slaughter” can already be found in biblical predecessors; prophetic weakness goes, so to speak, all the way down. If hegemonic Zionist ideology both sees itself as secular, that is, breaking with a premodern past, and also prioritizes a strong, self-assured national leader, Raz argues that actual Zionist literature is essentially continuous with what came before and contains within it a counter-discourse of incoherence, national disintegration, and even despair.

Raz’s book thus reminds me of Nancy Bentley’s phrase, which I continue to find endlessly productive: the “secularization two-step.” In this dance, a secular ideology initially posits a set of (highly ideological) dichotomies—in this case, ancient and modern, prophecy and poetry, authority and irony—and then compliments itself on the skillful balancing of the resulting tensions. In the book’s conclusion, Raz offers weak prophecy as an alternative, reparative model, offering us doubt and circumspection instead of confident certainty, whether theological or nationalist. I would also suggest a second, complementary payoff. To me, the positing of an ancient source that is dogmatic, masculine, and assertively authoritative is one of modernity’s favorite alibis for its own violence.

Indeed, there is a long tradition of liberal Zionists—and in this, I hasten to add, they resemble many other liberal nationalists—redirecting blame for their state’s violent misdeeds onto the not-yet-fully-digested legacy of a primitive past (a digestion for which the state and its cultural apparatus are imagined as the ideal stomach). For instance, I have long admired Shira Kupfer and Asaf Turgeman’s wonderful demonstration that absolute ethno-national solidarity under the name “ahavat Yisrael” is a modern construction, even though it is usually retrojected into classical tradition, as if it were something modernity inherited rather than produced. Or to give a more explosive example, Joan Wallach Scott has written about how, at the Nuremberg Trials, the Allied prosecutors took great pains to disassociate Nazi violence from the nation-state form, imagining the Third Reich as an atavistic, imperialist aberration to avoid the drawing of any invidious conclusions about the various genocides in which the United States or Great Britain had previously participated. In showing how Bialik, Ahad Ha’am and others construct a one-sided, strong, muscular ancient source, Raz has contributed to our picture of how Zionism refashioned the Jewish tradition it claimed to inherit, imagining its own muscular dogmatism as originating elsewhere, in a primeval past, and reserving for itself the modern doubt and skepticism.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago; his book, Fictions of God, has just been published.