Kaddish

The kaddish is a Jewish prayer said over the body of a deceased person. It affirms the absolute sovereignty and transcendence of God in the face of death. There is very little to be said for the dead themselves:

Mourner's Kaddish^[1]

The comfort of the ritual derives from placing God over and above all strife, all loss, all laceration. What, then, does this prayer offer after the death of God?

In David Ohana’s Trailing Nietzsche^[2], Gershom Scholem describes, in one of his early diary entries, the fall of the eternal, transcendent heaven to which the Kaddish pays tribute, understanding modernity to be the process of heaven slowly collapsing.

“In the 19th century, heaven was broken up until it vanished forever. After the age of romanticism had still retained the old dreams, there were two major periods of change. The first period was represented by Schopenhauer, Marx, and Stirner: ‘Schopenhauer was the one who murdered the absolute God. It’s just as Nietzsche said: God is utterly dead, even if his murderer limited himself to metaphysics.’ After Schopenhauer came Marx’s turn to shatter the illusions of the transcendental heaven and Stirner’s turn to say kaddish over God: [See Bauer on the relationship between the Unique One in Stirner and Substance in Spinoza] “After which a second generation - Strindberg, Nietzsche, and Ibsen - came on the scene to rattle heaven with their romanticism. For the upper classes they created a lot more stir in the dubious region of heaven than the other three. Next came Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, two giants who, no doubt, unwittingly destroyed heaven through their deep religiosity. We today have nothing left of the heaven of the past.”

There are a few striking claims in this diary entry of Scholem’s:

• 1: Heaven was destroyed in a number of stages. The first stage began with a metaphysical analysis of the Will and its incapacity to grasp its objects (Schopenhauer), then in the political-economic impossibility of Heaven on Earth^[3] in Marx, and then in the culling of the basic unity and purpose of the soul in Stirner’s egoism.

• 2: It is possible to demean heaven further through one’s attempts at revival. Is it also possible that this desecration is a necessary step in the struggle to redeem Justice from the murder of the One^[4]? [the end of satan]^[5]. This is the question of the Nomos^[6].

• 3: Scholem has Stirner reciting the Kaddish over God. This is the most perplexing choice he could have made from the authors listed. I see the vision. “The Unique One is substance driven to its greatest degree of abstraction”. Scholem seems to anticipate that the ghosts in the machine to which Stirner first gave a voice would be the key to this escape. The very form of logic that once guaranteed God’s transcendence had become the instrument of his murder — and only Stirner’s specters could slip through its grip^[3].

“Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it^[7], is not subordinate but superior^[8].” — Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling^[9]

“I only mention in passing that this ratio between two quantities that have disappeared, caught at the moment of their disappearance, is a contradiction; however, it cannot disturb us any more than it has disturbed the whole of mathematics for almost two hundred years.” [Engels] …it is necessary to recognize that this contradiction finally not only troubled mathematicians, but even scandalized them, that they applied all their efforts to the task of eliminating it and — it would be vain to deny it — they succeeded… “The dialectic does not express the nature of mathematics; it applies to the agent and not to the object of scientific activity.” — Georges Bataille & Raymond Queneau, The Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic^[10]

“It was the will to purify love of all preconditions that posed the unconditional existence of God as the supreme object of a rapturous escape from the self. But the conditional counterpart of divine majesty—the principle of political authority—leads the affective movement into the linkage of oppressed existences with moral imperatives; the affective movement is thrown back into the platitude of applied life, where the me as me withers away. …Burning passion is no longer acceptance and realization of nothingness: nothingness is still a cadaver; brilliance is the blood that flows and coagulates.” — Georges Bataille, Sacrifices^[11]

Scholem finds this passage in the Lesser Hekhaloth, where it appears as an anonymous theurgical reinterpretation of a saying by Hillel the Elder from the Sayings of the Fathers. Hillel’s original warning against the misuse of sacred knowledge is repurposed here to guard the secret divine names used in Merkabah mysticism — the practice of ascending through the celestial palaces to the throne of God.^[12]

“He who spreads his name loses his name, and who does not study deserves death, and who makes use of the crown [the secret name of God] vanishes, and who does not know kintemisa should be put to death, and who knows kintemisa will be asked for in the world to come, and who is the man who is able to ascend on high, to descend below…”

Walter Benjamin, in correspondence with Scholem and under his guidance, wrote two essays concerning the nature of the Name of God, and of the horizons of language. It is an overlooked piece, with a lot to offer in the LLM era:^[13]

“Mediation, which is the immediacy of all mental communication, is the fundamental problem of linguistic theory, and if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic. …In name, the mental entity that communicates communicates itself to God… in name the intensive totality of language, as the absolutely communicable mental entity, and the extensive totality of language, as the universally communicating (naming) entity, culminate.” — Walter Benjamin, On Language as Such and on the Language of Man

From the Shoshan Sodot^[14]:

“The deeply learned Rabbi Nathan, of blessed memory, said to me: Know that the complete secret of prophecy to a prophet consists in that he suddenly sees the form of his self standing before him, and he forgets his own self and ignores it…and that form speaks with him and tells him the future. And concerning this our sages said: ‘Great is the power of the prophets, who make the form appearing to them resemble its Former.’ And the learned sage Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, of blessed memory, said: ‘The one who hears at the time of prophecy is a human being, and the one who speaks is a human being.’

And another learned man wrote the following: ‘It occurred to me, by the power of combination of letters of the holy names of God and by solitary meditation, that I encountered that light which accompanied me, as I have discussed in the book Sha’arei Tsedek. But to see my own form standing before me — this I was not granted and this I cannot bring about.’

Yet another learned man writes the following: ‘And I, the young one, know and acknowledge with full certainty that I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet, and I have not the holy spirit and I do not make use of the heavenly voice; these things have not been vouchsafed to me, and I have not taken off my garment or washed my feet. Nevertheless, I call on heaven and earth to witness — as the heavens are my witness and my Guarantor is on high! — that one day I was sitting and writing down a Kabbalistic secret, when suddenly I saw the form of my self standing before me, and my own self disappeared from me, and I was forced and compelled to cease writing.’”

“Nothing Human Is Alien to Me” (taken at the summit above Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City)