The Symbol Translates the Divine

This week, I was reading more of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. Not exactly Passover reading, but I’ve been thinking about that too. In the first half of the third part of the Guide, Rambam speaks about symbols:

“For anything beheld in a prophetic vision is symbolic. Even the great epiphany at Sinai, greater than any prophetic vision and beyond all compare, was not without symbolism: God’s revealing himself in the thick of a cloud cautions us that we are barred from grasping His true Reality by the dark matter that envelops us–not for Him, for He is not a Body.

It is well known, too–a commonplace in our nation–that the day we stood before Mount Sinai was cloudy, overcast, and lightly raining” (Maimonides, The Guide , 315b.)

I found this quote funny because, at least for my stage in the history of the diaspora, it’s not a commonplace at all that the revelation at Mt. Sinai took place on a cloudy, overcast day with light rain. I have never heard that before. Perhaps it doesn’t come up just because it’s a perfectly banal observation to make about, as Maimonides said, the greatest moment of prophetic vision in our tradition. The revelation at Mt. Sinai was unique for many reasons, but one of them which Maimonides speaks about is that all of the people at Mt. Sinai heard the revelation–they simply did not know what it meant without Moses, the prophet, there to translate it into human language and the law.

The nature of a “symbol,” which Maimonides is explicating in this quote, is apparently that God reveals himself to us in signs because, in our limited human form as mere creations, of course we cannot cognize the divine without a sign, without the signifier as an intermediary method of communication. Even the fact that God revealed himself through clouds is a symbol–a symbol that communicates a warning, reminding us we will never understand him completely; we can never see God or the heavens because he is so far away, and even on the clearest day we perceive his signs through a haze.

Gershom Scholem defines the symbol similarly, as divine auto-representation that is communicated symbolically so as to fit into the finiteness of human reality:

"The conception that creation and revelation are both principally and essentially auto-representations of God himself, which as a consequence and in accordance with the infinite nature of the divinity, certain instants of the divine are introduced, which can only be communicated in terms of symbols in the finite and determined realm of all that is created.” (“The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah.”)

The symbol is a method of translation between divine infinity and human finitude. This is a different way of understanding signification than the common one in the 20th century, when figures such as Saussure and Levi-Strauss introduced a linguistic theory of signification. That theory is cynical, in a sense, because it suggests that nothing is apprehended to us directly, but everything must communicate in signs, and the signs themselves have no definite attachment to the object which they signify. The word “tree” has no inherent connection to an actual, living tree, for post-structuralist linguistics. This is a very complicated idea that I am oversimplifying too much for the sake of brevity.

A frequent idea in post-Holocaust theology, which I have seen represented in many poems about both pogroms and concentration camps, is that the Mosaic covenant is now void because of the violence Jews experienced. The atrocities at Auschwitz, or in shtetlekh during the Ukrainian Civil War, are so severe that God has upended his side of the bargain and the covenant is now irrelevant. Peretz Markish describes this very strongly by saying that the tablets are now covered with blood.

 Paul Celan, who is considered a Holocaust poet — although I find that denomination to be somewhat limiting for understanding his work — violated the covenant in a different way: by uprooting the status of symbols. Readers of Celan have called him mystical for many reasons and one of these is his relationship to language itself. Jewish mystics, unlike post-structural linguists, consider there to be an essential connection between a word and that which it refers to. This is a ladder or chain of being, which begins with the object itself and connects all the way up to source. We don’t know every link in the chain, but we can rest assured that the name connects what we see with God’s intention for creating it.

For Celan, words are more like blocks or playthings, which he contorts in all sorts of ways that are grammatically possible only in German, inventing concepts like “memoryrose,” “breathturn” and “timestead,” among literally innumerable authors. Celan often connects a concept that isn’t really objective, or doesn’t signify something tangible–light “night” or “time”--and combines it with a totally mundane, seemingly random object. It’s not so easy for a word to be a sign, or a symbol that connects an object to the divine, when we use our human powers of language to break words until their meaning is either completely gone, or unrecognizable to us.

In “The Meridian,” which I wrote about a few weeks ago, Celan claims that the meridian itself is that which connects seemingly unrelated things. This is a metaphysical property akin to language, which also connects separate things. “The Meridian” doesn’t have such a clear, Maimonidean reason to it, though; rather than a chain of Being that connects creation, human cognition, and the divine, it is a schizophrenic property of association where the (psychotic) human observer can recognize patterns among seemingly unrelated things. Like conspiracy theories, or Celan’s frequent invocation of recurring moments in time, or the “You” who is his interlocutor, a personality that he essentially diffuses over the entire landscape of his work.

I think that Celan’s poetics represent a different kind of rupture with the Mosaic covenant: one at the level of language and the symbol itself. After the experience of epochal violence, after life was destroyed for the Jews, there can no longer be that comparatively straightforward relationship between human beings, God, and language. We can no longer simply trust that everything has a meaning which is God representing himself through a veil; not every word gains its ineluctable meanings from the divine. Rather, as stranded humans on Earth in a condition of suffering, language becomes ours to form blind associations and to live through an affirmative logic where all things are connected by perception, not by divine creation.

I wish you all luck this week as we remind ourselves of the journey from the desert we continue to make, into freedom—something not all people have—and remember the journeys we have taken together.