American Kabbalistic Poetry
Earlier this year, Rabbi Henry wrote in his newsletter column about Wallace Berman and the kabbalistic poetry journal, Tree. It was at this time that Henry also introduced me to the journal. For the next few newsletters, I will attempt to offer my own reading of its historical and literary significance.
It may be unexpected that it was a group of west-coast poets in the late 60s and 70s, from a highly assimilated Jewish-American background, living in the peak of the free love movement and new age spirituality, who were the first to introduce many works of Kabbalah to the American audience. Nonetheless, this is the case. In 1970, at the time when Tree’s first volume was published, only two works by Gershom Scholem had been published in English. Scholem was a pathbreaker for academic study of the Kabbalah, unearthing texts and conducting important philological research for the first time in any language. Like the Berkeley poets who edited and published Tree, Scholem grew up in a highly assimilated atmosphere where Jewish religious practice was very sparing and not particularly tied to religious beliefs or devotion. On a journey of language learning and academic research, Scholem ended up not only returning to the sacred religious concepts himself, but connecting endless future generations to these texts. Scholem was the first to offer a possibility for studying Kabbalah from the secular world. While he remained devoted to explicating the Kabbalah and its teachings, Scholem never became an orthodox or halakhically observant Jew, a decision which he discusses in his memoir, From Berlin to Jerusalem.
At the end of Tree vol. 1, the editors included a section called “A Checklist,” providing a list of essential publications on the Kabbalah, both primary texts and scholarship. This includes the Zohar, Sefer Yetsirah, the Book of Enoch, Moses Cordovero, Isaac Luria, Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, and the Tanya, as well as more recent works such as Louis Ginzberg, one work by Gershom Scholem, five books by Martin Buber, and a wide variety of scholarly texts from the 1960s which, to the best of my knowledge, are no longer cited today since they’ve been replaced by more up-to-date scholarship. This syllabus is very significant because it means that any readers of Tree, including non-Jewish beatniks and American poets who were not yet initiated into the Kabbalah, had access to a fairly comprehensive list of the works of Kabbalah that were available in English at that time. The poems included in Tree demonstrate with certainty that the Jewish mystical tradition had an influence on American Jewish poetry, but it is also conceivable that it had an even greater influence than that, initiating its readership into this esoteric tradition. Tree also presented Kabbalah from a specifically Jewish perspective, not the Christian Kabbalah which was more prevalent and accessible at that time.
Tree represents a fascinating juncture in religious life of modernity, a moment when many left-wing and radicalized Americans were compelled to return to religious belief to escape what they saw as the oppressive confines of American society and domination by the United States government. In his extended prose poem at the beginning of Tree, vol. 1: “Shemo,” repeating contributor Jack Hirschman writes about his discovery of the Zohar along with the I Ching. This piece is constructed as a confessional letter to David Meltzer, the editor of Tree. Hirschman writes that “Zohar held something authentic for me [...] I have not to this day begun the depths of that book still affrighted by its conditions [...] woefully aware that as far as it is concerned I am as much a snatcher of magic now as I was a snatcher of European literature then” (pg. 7).
Hirschman is joining a long line of Jewish mystics who considered the real tradition to be beyond reach for their modern lives; he can be no more than a “snatcher,” never a practitioner or an initiate. As Gil Anidjar has written about in Our Place in Al Andalus, Jewish mysticism always sees the real truth of the mystic tradition and heritage as being at a remove and separated from the subject who contemplates it, just as the fundamental human condition is to be separated from God. Specifying what he refers to as “European literature” in this quote, on another page Hirschman lists some predecessors for mystical literature, or “magical writings” in his words: “Aligieri Brune Blake Baudelaire Poe Lautreaumont Mallarme Yeats Joyce” (6). This Kabbalah is drawn from both directions, Jewish and goyish, in a syncretic melding that Hirschman bashfully admonishes himself for. Hirschman’s claim to the I Ching is more bold. Somehow when it comes to this other esoteric tradition, fewer scruples are necessary: “The I Ching fascinating from the first I threw the coins on a Greek island synchronic with the invasion of North Viet Nam [...] the Ching no doubt a psychic displacement of Doctor Jung” (9).
The invasion of Vietnam was an important piece of context for Hirschman’s general outlook and how he characterizes his generation’s interest in Kabbalah. This context connects an interest in mysticism with a primordial drive to protest and fight domination, activated by the war and the struggle against it. He writes, “I am telling of a moments struggle still possible amidst the electrick shenanigans” (8) and then later that “Between 1965 and 1967 in missionary madness completely righteous with personal and cosmological conspiratorial sexual uptight strife I insist was forced upon the organs from without when the government bombarded the Pineal gland with war fucking up all sexuality and moreover began the evil business of sucking the pigment pride which also derives from that gland out of the black man in a cyclical reusage that was to culminate in the 1968 election” (10). According to Hirschman’s history, the Vietnam war shocked everyone’s endocrine system, resulting in a deficiency in sexual eros as well as a loss of energy in Black radical struggle in the 60s. In the midst of all of this, Hirschman suggests, Jews long for a world of “the verbal magic,” which is “in fact a translation subserving a being otherwhere most evidently present” (12).
Some fifty years prior, in his untranslated work Events and Encounters (“Ereignisse und Begegnungen,”) Martin Buber also wrote about the Buddha in a series of short essays about various topics, including sheydim or demons. For Buber, as the scholar Paul Mendes-Flohr has argued, Jewish mysticism was a relic of the East which had been relatively untouched by modernity. Eastern Europe, being far to the east of what was properly considered Europe for most of world history, might as well be as far east as Buddhism. Buber treated both religious traditions with an orientalist perspective, despite the fact that he had ties from his own childhood to a Hasidic community his grandparents were a part of.
In the coming weeks, I hope to write about Tree’s work publishing various kabbalistic sources for the first time in English. This includes the well-known and influential poet Edmond Jabès, the Egyptian Jewish-French author whose kabbalistic poetry influenced philosophers such as Derrida and Blanchot.
