Against Tony Judt (and for Dresden Antifa)

Back in December, the New York Review of Books published an essay by Tony Judt with the title “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?” based on a lecture he delivered in October 2009.

You may have read it. Bit.ly tells me that over 2,200 people have clicked on one of their links for it.

I think it sucks.

Here’s why.

“A social democracy of fear”—this is not something to fight for, this is something to fight against.

Tony Judt raises the spectre of social democracy as the force of Keynes and of postwar Britain: the NHS, social housing, a wealth gap between rich and poor that was decreasing, not increasing.

That’s lovely. I want all that. I want all of that. I want national single-payer healthcare, I want access to good quality housing for all, and I definitely want to reverse the trend of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

But Judt invokes this vision along with another—he invokes it as a response to the fear of fascism:

Thus Keynes sought an increased role for the social security state, including but not confined to countercyclical economic intervention. Hayek proposed the opposite. In his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, he wrote:

No description in general terms can give an adequate idea of the similarity of much of current English political literature to the works which destroyed the belief in Western civilization in Germany, and created the state of mind in which naziism could become successful.

In other words, Hayek explicitly projected a fascist outcome should Labour win power in England. And indeed, Labour did win. But it went on to implement policies many of which were directly identified with Keynes. For the next three decades, Great Britain (like much of the Western world) was governed in the light of Keynes’s concerns.

Since then, as we know, the Austrians have had their revenge.

Judt then goes on to suggest that, in fact, social democracy is what prevents the emergence of fascism. That a state that reduces the wealth gap, that offers the poor “social services as of right” rather than as a handout will be investing in and invested in social conditions that prevent a fascist mindset from taking hold.

This account, however, seems to willfully ignore key reasons why social democracy found so little purchase in Weimar Germany.

Of all the proponents of the rhetoric of social democracy in history, it is harder to find stronger advocates for it than those of the SPD at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The SPD of the time was a mass workers’ party (much like Labour) that had decided to pursue social democracy as its tool for social transformation.

Yet where did these advocates lead the people? Into the jaws of death, into another imperial war. The social democrats, fearing to lose their place at the table revealed themselves to be just another tool of the elite who didn’t give a damn about the people.

The rise of Nazism in Germany didn’t just come out of a state indifferent to the effects of mounting inequalities—it also came out of crises in which it became quite apparent to the people how little the official social democratic party had to offer them. Chief among these crises were the World War, the Inflation, and the Depression.

I wish I could applaud Tony Judt for addressing the failings and dangers of neoliberalism, but his approach to these is backwards. He asks:

But what if we treated humiliation itself as a cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to “quantify” the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens before receiving the mere necessities of life? In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. Such an exercise is inherently contentious: How do we quantify “humiliation”?

How do we quantify the humiliation of being told that we should not argue directly that housing is a human right, but rather that we should try to measure how miserable we all feel when we face situations like barely being able to afford the rent, or struggling to pay the mortgage, or having lost homes to foreclosure?

Is Tony Judt willing to ask Lenise Forrest to quantify how humiliated she felt when she was evicted from public housing in Chicago a few weeks ago?

When we demand housing as a right, we demand it as a right, not “as of” right and not “as if” it were a right, but because it already is a right. Just one that is denied and unmet.

Many left progressives in the United States have a great love for the idea of a British-style social democracy. They dreamed that Obama would bring us another New Deal, another attempt at the Great Society, in short a social democracy of hope. (And change.)

I hate Sarah Palin, but when she asks “How’s that hopey-changey stuff going for you?” it has a resonance, and we all know why.

But the answer isn’t some “social democracy of fear.” How could a social democracy of fear address the issues that drew the Left to Obama in the first place?

How could a “social democracy of fear” prevent Guantánamo? How could a “social democracy of fear” prevent the PATRIOT act? How could a “social democracy of fear” prevent another illegal, stupid war whipped together with fears of terrorism and fears of all those strange other people that are coded as a threat to “our” existence?

(Rather than as people deserving of that same right to housing, that same right to healthcare, that same right to an education, that same right to a decent quality of life, that same right to have a say and a force in the situations of that life.)

How could such a “social democracy of fear,” constituted in fear for the existence of a civil society, and only willing to fight for services “as of right” in order to preserve social stability, really stand up for our rights, really prevent such racist and fascist fear-mongering and what it entails?

In Dresden today, for the first time in years, the annual Neonazi march through the city on the anniversary of the firebombing was prevented. It was stopped.

And it wasn’t stopped by the forces presenting themselves as “civil society”:

Their “human chain” action in the “old city” doesn’t actually compare to the action taken by about 12,000 leftist antifa supporters who held massive sit-in blockades of all the major marching routes that had been announced across town, near the train station.

The mayor of the city called the officially endorsed hand-holding symbolism a sign that made the city a “fortress against intolerance and stupidity” (eine Festung gegen Intoleranz und Dummheit).

But it’s not a sign from civil society against intolerance that stopped the Nazis this year—it was the intolerance of the left to letting the Nazis have their regular spectacle. It was direct action under the slogan ¡No Pasarán! (They shall not pass!)

While the mayor, Helma Orosz of the CDU, the Ministerpresident of Saxony, Stanislaw Tillich, and representatives of the public museums, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, all took part in the human chain that wound its way through the center of old Dresden, across the river Elbe, Antifa blocked not only the streets surrounding the main train station but also the train tracks themselves at some platforms.

Although the BBC and others are now claiming that stopping the march was a victory for civil society, civil society went as far as to call the posters of one of the main organizing groups a call to violence and to confiscate 5,000 of them in the weeks leading up to the sit-in. The police also tried intimidate private bus companies that had been hired to help antifa protesters. Meanwhile, only a few weeks ago, when antifa in Vienna protested against the annual ball of the far-right wing Burschenschaften (dueling fraternities) held in the halls of the republic in the Hofburg, the protest was first legally forbidden and then violently suppressed.

So, no, Tony Judt, I don’t think that your “social democracy of fear” is something to fight for. I think it’s another name for “civil society” and such civil societies can tolerate torture, they can tolerate slavery, they can tolerate fabricated wars, they can tolerate punitive occupations, they can tolerate colonialism, they can tolerate genocide, and they can certainly find it in themselves to tolerate a little fascism, when it serves them.

But it doesn’t serve us.

Lincoln Place Apartments

The impression I think many people have of housing in Los Angeles is roughly this: a vast flat plane of single-family homes that stretches for hundreds of square miles. GRID CITY.

los angeles basin
Originally uploaded by g. s. george

This is a good impression to have, because it is roughly true. Yet, it is also somewhat misleading. Beyond single-family homes, the other ubiquitous housing element in Los Angeles is the garden apartment complex. Thousands of units were built, especially in the 1940s, in particular with section 608 subsidies from the Federal Housing Administration. (N.B. that the links in the prior sentence should be taken w/ more than a grain of salt and also understood in the context of FHA redlining.)

Among the thousands of garden apartment complexes built in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s, Baldwin Hills Village (now called Village Green) was internationally famous and is now a federal landmark. (More on it in a later post.) Less well known are the Lincoln Place Apartments in Venice.

When I first moved back to Los Angeles in 2005, they were in the news, but I was not then who I am now, and I did not fully grasp what was being talked about—the largest single-day eviction lockout in Los Angeles’s history:

I only encountered the Lincoln Place Apartments by accident—I was house-sitting in Mar Vista and decided to walk to the beach in Venice and found them on my way back.

I wandered around the complex in awe, sadness, and no small envy. I’d been living in an apartment in a run-down building for four years—my unit was the only occupied one out of four, which is a whole other story. But while my place had hardwood floors and linoleum in the kitchen, it didn’t have these amenities: garages, clotheslines, balconies, grass to play on, walkways and other off-street areas, landscaping, good light and good shade throughout the unit . . .

Built between 1949 and 1951, it was designed by Ralph A. Vaughn, with Heth Wharton as the project manager. Neither is well known today, despite the fact that Vaughn was one of the first African-American architects in Los Angeles and in the United States to work on anything as large or as significant as a housing complex with hundreds of units.

So in this city, obsessed with its history of modern architecture, not only is Lincoln Place an under-appreciated example of the modernist vernacular of the garden apartment done very very well, Ralph A. Vaughn is not usually on anyone’s list of great Los Angeles architects. And as Wikipedia points out, still, today, less than 2% of all licensed architects in the United States are black.

View Larger Map

The other outstanding element of the complex exists outside of the complex itself—its placement within the city. As you can see in the map, the Lincoln Place Apartments are not only lovely in themselves, but they are also practically adjacent to a park, recreation center, and municipal golf course. They are near to bus stops and within a twenty-minute walking distance of the beach. These sorts of urban planning considerations ought to be the standard, but they aren’t.

Walking around Los Angeles, especially the more suburban parts, is often an encounter with spaces that feel empty—houses, houses, houses, apartments, apartments, apartments—and only a few people. But these units were empty in another way—clearly depopulated artificially. I eventually turned a corner and found a few units where people were still living.

But before I could see if anyone was home, find out from them what the story was, I was chased out by the private security guards, who had started following me on their bicycles and eventually told me that I couldn’t take any pictures of the place.

When I asked them who owned the units and told the guards how much I loved buildings, they refused to answer and stared at me as if I were crazy. A few minutes later, I found a lonely yard sale located across the street from some of the empty units. The guy told me a bit about the story, roughly: “Oh, it’s been like that for years. Some huge lawsuit or something is keeping them from tearing it down and building something new. Weird, I usually forget it’s there.”

That’s one of the things about Los Angeles—a gorgeous complex of over 700 units spread over 38 acres sitting empty for years can be forgotten, even by people who live next door, let alone in other parts of the city.

The Supreme Court this week just expanded the political rights of corporations on the basis of their personhood. Meanwhile, the tenants at Lincoln Place have been fighting eviction for over twenty years. This September we heard that they had won—a settlement was announced that would allow tenants to return, protect the very few that had been able to stay, and offer restitution. But when I went back there just a few weeks ago, the units were still empty, the rent-a-cops were still there. Corporations might be able to wait forever, but the rest of us cannot.

turning it upside down

Im ein ani li, mi li? U’kh’she’ani le’atzmi, mah ani? V’im lo ‘akhshav, eimatai?
——Hillel’s questions, Pirkei Avot, 1:14.

1. If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
2. And if I am only for myself, what am I?
3. And if not now, when?

In this order, this is a formula for:

1. A politics of representation.
2. And an ethics of righteousness based on charity and loving deeds (tzedakah & g’milut chasadim).
3. And a praxis of deferral.

Let’s reverse it, shall we, and find out what we get?

If not now, when?

No Future vs Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight

The Singularity has been denigrated as “The Rapture For Nerds,” and not without cause. It’s pretty much indivisible from the religious faith in describing the desire to be saved by something that isn’t there (or even the desire to be destroyed by something that isn’t there) and throws off no evidence of its ever intending to exist.
——Warren Ellis

If the future was always a trick, “pie in the sky when you die,” shouldn’t we start thinking about the absence of the future as a liberation?
——Voyou

I want the future not to betray us, but if it finds the same answers, perhaps we will have failed to change the question. Further, if we demand that some future preserve our forms of response, then we become trapped in the matter of what and how to preserve anything. And the most pressing point is not to preserve the world, but to change it. If we start with the premise that the future must make its own arrangements, that it’s not going to come and save us, neither by flood nor by fire, neither by magical technognosis nor by inevitable protelarian revolution, we’re left where we are.

Now.

In a certain sense, our history is a pile of things to use or discard that, having come into being, still exist now. These things of history are not mute and they are not evenly distributed around us. Our precise placement in their field is one of those given conditions.

Moreover, it is important to distinguish between history and the past. For, retroactive causation notwithstanding, we don’t generally act in the past.

We may fervently wish to refight old battles, but the past is a foreign country, as they say, and not where we live now, even if our terrain is fully populated with its objects and effects. I’m not particularly in the mood to betray the past, but I’m not going to wring my hands over whether it would feel it has my allegiance.

The time of praxis is always now.

If I am only for myself, what am I?

Some remarks on the experiences of alienation and lability

My heart is a poured out bucket.
In the same way invokers of spirits invoke spirits, I invoke
My own self and find nothing.
I go to the window and see the street with absolute clarity.
I see the shops, I see the sidewalks, I see the passing cars,
I see the clothed living beings who pass each other.
I see the dogs that also exist,
And all of this weighs on me like a sentence of exile,
And all of this is foreign, like everything else.
——Fernando Pessoa (writing as Álvaro de Campos), TOBACCO SHOP (January 1928) [scroll down, via dc]

We just don’t know what people are like, we can never tell; there isn’t any truth about human beings, no formula that meets each one of us. And there are some of us—aren’t there?—who are nothing, who are so labile that we astound ourselves; we’re the chameleons.
——John Le Carré, A Murder of Quality (New York: Signet, 1964), 124. [via k-punk]

The panic that comes of a glimpse of the whateverness of the self, the fact that the ownmost is just a particularly tight inflection point of the generalized Gerede that goes around is after all, a yawp that we are long familiar with and that we know leads nowhere. . . . But facing up to this danger might also be a risk that one has to take if one would puncture the bubble or illuminate the potentialities of the one-day open city of the self.
——Adswithoutproducts

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
——Walt Whitman, The Song of Myself

The thing about this question is that it should not be taken as a matter of simple rhetoric; not acknowledged with a flourish that nods along, “yes, yes, being selfish is MONSTROUS, too true.” No, really: what am I?

It is not enough to assert that the self is alienated from the world, that it often perceives its inability to access things as they are as a devastating gulf. We ought to also understand the pleasure and pain of lability, the frequent sense of the self as an inexpressibly infinite undecidability, not merely as a sensation of alienation from things of the world, but also as a reflexion of the self’s simultaneous immersion in and alienation from a world of things that are themselves not stable but rather constantly changing.*

The individual self that exists for itself is an unanswerable flux. A view at a point that constantly experiences its own subjective alienation, its own labile indeterminacy, and its own shifting social objectification.

It is this last that leads to the final question.

For the charge against the claim of any universal experience of lability is that this a privileged position of those who do not feel like objects, who have not been made to feel like objects—that it is a self-nihilating and self-infinitizing position held by those who have the social power to be able to escape a condition:

The middle class assumes a kind of transcendent, post-historical emptiness into which all cultures can be incorporated. This is not simply hyper-consumerism it’s also a metaphysical claim, a claim to superiority, thus while others are bounded by ethnicity, class, gender; limited, objects, with a finite set of facets and characteristics, the hipster, viewing everything as simply a lifestyle choice, views her own not just as one lifestyle among many but the lifestyle of lifestyles.
——The Impostume

But this is not my position. A middle-class desire to “vacation” in the percepts of others doesn’t erase the issue of any individual subject’s sense of its own alienation and indeterminacy. Further, surely a middle class subject, propped up as it often is by social configurations that tend to reinforce stability: property, family, religion, order—surely this subject does not have any special access to the experience of self as an undecidable potential.

What I am arguing is that the individual self-for-itself is a kind of emptiness, precisely because it hardly exists—the individual self is always a social object as much as it is an agent subject.

If I am only for myself, what am I? If find that what I am is a convergence of all of the social positions I’ve been in and taken along with my performative and practical potential in the social situations I find myself in, put myself in, and am put in, can this be only for myself? The question is: what to do with this state of affairs?

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

On common struggle

This is perhaps the trickiest part of the reversal and I don’t think I have any pithy quotes for it that I haven’t used up in prior posts. I think that what’s relevant is to address this question of politics and representation after having already considered the prior two questions on praxis in time and the nature of the individual self.

The traditional reading is quite rhetorically simple, and perhaps it is the one to return to:
No one else can be for me. I must be for myself.

The reason that I say that this leads to a politics of representation, when invoked as the first question, is that it does not question the priority of the individual self. But the individual self cannot functionally make politics, and thus the question answers itself through a sort of sleight of hand: through the representation that was always promised, through the “who”ever I shall look to, to be for me, when I find that I cannot be for myself.

But let’s take it last.
No one else can be for me. I must be for myself.

What is the self that must act?

If the individual self is generally in a state of arbitrary whateverness, but realizes that it must engage in politics from its social position, and then finds that it cannot act alone except by choosing some representation——what other selves could exist?

Here I guess I do want to invoke a quote:

The simplest definition of ‘identity’ is the series of characteristics and properties by which an individual or a group recognizes itself as its ‘self’. But what is this ‘self’? It is that which, across all the characteristic properties of identity, remains more or less invariant. . . . Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to difference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which is invariant. The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am not the other. This is often indispensable, in the face of authoritarian demands for integration, for example. The Moroccan worker will forcefully affirm that his traditions and customs are not those of the petty-bourgeois European; he will even reinforce the characteristics of his religious or customary identity. The second involves the immanent development of identity within a new situation—rather like Nietzsche’s famous maxim, ‘become what you are.’ The Moroccan worker does not abandon that which constitutes his individual identity, whether socially or in the family; but he will gradually adapt all this, in a creative fashion, to the place in which he finds himself. He will thus invent what he is—a Moroccan worker in Paris—not through any internal rupture, but by an expansion of identity.
——Badiou

I want to posit that the selves that must act in politics are the selves we recognize in situations where a common identity in a common situation cannot be represented. Where the representation of that common identity has been averted or foreclosed.

The common self that emerges in such recognition, is the one where I identify with you because what you face is what I face, and you identify with me, because what I face is what you face, and having found ourselves together in this way along with many others in the same situation, we realize that together we can act to change the situation.

This attitude towards common struggle means that I cannot get away with only weeping about how much I hope that things get better for you, and not for me, because you are the real victim and I am but a helpless cog in the machine that is punishing you. It also doesn’t mean that I get to play at being you, if what you face is not what I face. These are two sides of a sadomasochistic gesture that only works to reinscribe that power relation. (On this point, see Savran, who I’ve been upping for a while now.)

But the we that we create when we recognize what we both face together is the new political self, required to act for itself.

A few things y’all might want to know

For the record, here are things that have happened in the past year (give or take) that you might not have heard about through your channels, depending on who you are. Some of these will be very familiar to some of you, I’m sure. I’m presenting them in roughly chronological order:

• Protests in Greece, South Korea, and Iceland
• Race Fail 09 (the library, in reverse chronological order)
• The Communism Conference (and its critiques, some of them here, also in reverse chronological order)
• This is by Us (an oppositional intervention at the dance program of the University of Minnesota, Spring 2009)
• G20 Meltdown action (and all of the discussion it produced, link offers only a flavor—to see some unfolding sort by most recent, then reverse sort)
• Visteon Occupation
• Bildungsstreik (June edition, including the first of the occupations at Uni Marburg)
• Kitastreik (and the work of ver.di in general this year)
• Vestas Occupation
• Ssangyong factory occupation in South Korea
• Resistance to the coup in Honduras (ongoing, see murder of Walter Tróchez)
• ClimateCamp and its critiques (a few gathered here)
• Victory for the Tenants of Lincoln Place (though still hollow until they get to move back in, and as of earlier this month, when I was last there almost all units were still vacant)
• UC/CSU/California community college walkouts
• Basta Dobbs
• UCSC Occupation/Occupy California
• UC protests and UC occupations and CSU protests and CSU occupations and community college protests
• Royal Mail Strike
• Unsere Uni: 80 universities occupied in Europe (mostly in Austria & Germany—Bildungsstreik, the second round)
• Another round of protests in Greece
• Museum workers on strike in France
• Copenhagen protests and the Tuvalu position

I’m sure there are tons more that I don’t know about, because my channels don’t extend there.

Starting to exhume myself from my own sense of basically complacent or masochistic incapacity has not happened through the force of my private will, or only through some intense engagements with specific people—a certain triangulation of my libido around forming myself as an object for new others—(though in that, I’d like to thank especially cm, dc, and @pigsmeats for going on mental adventures with me), but has happened because the material and rhetorical circumstances of my settings in the world have shifted and I’ve been paying attention.

For many, myself included, the possibility of Obama was a kind of love, and like any good love it involved feeling capable and willing to take new chances. That energy was called forth, however, concurrently with the series of drastic defeats we’ve also seen this year (in non-chronological order):

• on healthcare
• in Copenhagen
• on torture
• on immigration
• on war
• on housing
• on pensions
• on parks
• the massacre of public education in California and many other places
• silence in the face of Gaza
• many drastic defeats on employment
• and in our workplaces
• and an Entblößung, a revelation, an apocalypse if you will, of what we already knew but wanted to disavow about how our political economy works and for who.

This last, because of how it is inextricable from the material immiseration of millions, cannot entirely be removed as a spark hidden in the shit.

Yet, by the time we were all grossly insulted by Obama winning the Nobel Prize, these two series of events had demonstrated that the energy of “his” potential had blasted way beyond the channels and vessels within which the powerful had hoped to contain it.

Let’s find strategically and tactically useful ways to strengthen this kind of unleashing.

(I am ashamed to say that where I work, the most that was achieved was an anonymous blog that was taken down once the latest round of layoffs was completed.)

Finally, I want to present you with two statements that both shaped my thinking this past year. I’m putting these behind a cut-tag, because @pigsmeats accused me of teal deering y’all, though he also accused me of making up that phrase, which just goes to show something or other.

some aspects of the regulating force of family

1st a quote from an email I wrote to dc of imbecile questions a few weeks ago:

let me just say that when I joke about my family being ethnically middle-class, I have not meant this merely as a descriptor of their manners (though that’s true) or of them as some biologically determined bürgertum because they are all so dang smart (sarcasm) . . .

no, what I have meant is that what is typically called the middle class, perhaps mostly by non-marxists who seem to have some kind liberal faith in it, describes my family perfectly, almost pathetically stereotypically so.

and furthermore, the other thing that I have meant by this phrase is that this stereotypical middle class avails itself of the extended family as a economic entity, or at least, it fictionalizes and idolizes the potential to do so, and that the extended family in this scenario acts with certain kinds of censorship, silencing, intimidation, and ostracism to enforce its class position. if anything is inherited in terms of class, it is not something biological (not really), and not just something cultural—but rather certain material assets and a position within a social kinship network that has disparate access to certain material assets.

(this came partly as a response to this post on grundlegung.)

2nd, let me offer two illustrations, both direct consequences of the prior post on this blog.

a message I received in my inbox the morning after from my sister:

and the chat log transcript between me and her that night:

screaming c’mon give us our souls back

the plot was: will the tree make it to the supernova on time?

The tree of crucifixion served to cancel out or overcome the tree of the fall. But for Christians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it did something more than simply annul an earlier Old Testament typology; it helped to create a sense of shared being. The tree of crucifixion not only freed the world from sin, it guaranteed a world in which humans could be mirror-reflections of God. First, God gave us ourselves in creation, then gave us God’s self in incarnation, and, finally, gave us ourselves again, our true restored selves, in crucifixion. This was the reality imagined in the branches of the tree of crucifixion—the reality of a shared flesh.
——Sara Ritchey. “Spiritual Arborescence: Trees in the Medieval Christian Imagination.” Spiritus 8.1 (2008): 64–82.

———

We owe more to God for redeeming us than for making us. His word made us; but when it came to redeem us, that word must be made flesh, and that flesh must suffer. In our creation, He gave us ourselves; but, in our redemption, He gave us himself; and, by giving himself for us, gave us ourselves again that were lost; so that we owe ourselves, and all that we have, twice told: and now, what shall we give unto thee, O thou Preserver of men, for ourselves thus given and restored?
——Joseph Henshaw, Horae Succisivae; or, Spare Hours of Meditations, upon Our Duty to God, to Others, and to Ourselves, ed. William Turnbull (London: printed by T. Payne for Ralph Mabbe, 1640; reprint, London: James Darling, 1839), 82–83.

———

For the philosophers of materialism tell us, and this they say is verifiable, that we are but albumen and a little phosphorus with much water and some salines, derived by automatic evolution from the star-dust. Through almost countless processes of intermolecular change and development, yet by a single chain of natural, consecutive, necessary causation, WE come from IT! Trace the chain upwards, so they affirm, and you will find it was the slumbering potency of life in the primitive molecules of the nebulae, which gave us ourselves!
§ 37. I desire not to be misunderstood: let me then remark that nothing is here said in derogation of the theory of evolution and continuity of law under the creating hand of God, what is spoken of is spontaneous self-evolution of self-existent matter through molecular potency. Now this philosophy, so long as it remained in the region of speculation and spoke only in camerâ, need not have troubled us; but when it trenches upon faith and morals, and presumes to ridicule what it calls “the traditional beliefs,” it at once challenges our observation and elicits our denial. For dare we, at the beck and call of such crude speculations, abandon not only our faith in God but our very SELF, as a fragment of a once mighty vessel that has gone to pieces on the rocks?
——Richard Tudor, The Philosophy of Church Life; or, The Church of Christ, Viewed as the Means whereby God Manifests Himself to Mankind (London: Parker & Co., 1887), 510–511.

———

[Luria] taught that God, in order to make room for the world, yielded space which his own presence had filled. . . . His attributes, or emanations, or potencies, continued to fill the shapes, the vessels, of worldly appearances. But the vessels proved unable to contain the divine light. They broke. The sparks fell and scattered and were mixed with the dross of earthly existence.
——Chaim Potok, quoted in Will Soll, “Chaim Potok’s ‘Book of Lights’: Reappropriating Kabbalah in the Nuclear Age,” Religion & Literature 21, no. 1 (1989): 111-35.

———

Further, war casts a longer shadow over The Book of Lights than over any other of Potok’s novels. The shadow comes both from the past (World War II and Korea) and the future (fear of nuclear war); in the meantime, as Gershon reflects in Korea, “there was no war, but people kept crashing into shards of the world that broke their lives” (60).
The sadness that Potok feels is so strong that he even proposes, through Gershon, that it be added to the canonical list of the ten sefirot: “a deep and fearful sadness, a palpable realm, a sefirah, as real an emanation of the Divine Being as were royalty, wisdom, understanding, power, grace, and the others” (124).
——Soll, “Chaim Potoks’s ‘Book of Lights,’” 117.

———

Listen, listen, came the seductive whisper from the darkness. I journey from the other side with a burden of chill truths. Why are you so afraid? Is it possible that illusion is more welcome to you than truth? Listen, listen.
——Potok via Soll, 120.

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But the most profound applications of the Zohar‘s doctrine of evil as an excess of judgment untempered by mercy are made in connection with the atomic bomb, a “measureless, hypertrophical outbreak” of wrath if ever there was one. The process of the creation of the bomb parallels the origin of evil. Rationality and judgment, operating independently of other factors, have taken “the light of creation . . . and returned the light of death” (307).
——Soll, 121

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How does one live in a world thus haunted by the stains of one’s forebears, by the shadow of the abyss of annihilation?
——Soll, 123

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seneh—sinai—etz chayim—tree of life—unquenchable fire

I lost my faith last week. It broke over the tenth of the big laws, the last of the aseret had’varim: “Thou shalt not covet.”