Rebrewing of Abrahamic Texts that are Beyond Completion
The Babylonian Talmud is a work beyond completion,
which may help to explain
why God invented not just Tosafot,
but Aharonim, who weren’t born in time to be called Rishon,
great rabbis who attempted to unravel the
Gemara’s Gordian knot.
Kafka tried to unravel it in human beings’ trials,
but he never managed.
It seems each time that he came close, it completely vanished.
This would have happened to his writings too had they not be saved
by his good friend in Prague, Franz Brod,
preserved as Moses preserved Israelites, his prayers preventing threats of their destruction that had been
pronounced on them by God.
An interesting connection between masterpieces in Hebrew and Aramaic, and classics that are
Grecian,
is that the bottom lines of their great magna opera lack, although tamim, blameless, a completion,
inspiring readers to pursue paths that may lead to more perfection
when they rebrew
the texts, enhancing thus the flavor the original produced in Greek or
Aramaic or Hebrew.
Using the Hebrew word tamim to signify “blamelessly complete,” Gen. 17:1 states:
הִ֣י אַבְרָ֔ם בֶּן־תִּשְׁעִ֥ים שָׁנָ֖ה וְתֵ֣שַׁע שָׁנִ֑ים וַיֵּרָ֨א יְהֹוָ֜ה אֶל־אַבְרָ֗ם וַיֹּ֤אמֶר אֵלָיו֙ אֲנִי־אֵ֣ל שַׁדַּ֔י הִתְהַלֵּ֥ךְ לְפָנַ֖י וֶהְיֵ֥ה תָמִֽים׃
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, GOD appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am El Shaddai. Walk in My ways and be tamim, blamelessly complete.”
Tamim can mean not only “blameless” but “complete.”
In “Franz Kafka, Party Animal,” The New Yorker, January 9, 2023, Becca Rothfeld writes:
Literature usually reaches us in its finished form, when it has already ossified into irrevocability. By the time a book is bound and printed, it is easy to forget that the words were once in motion. Franz Kafka’s fitful fiction provides a reminder. Most of his work was published posthumously, through the efforts of his best friend, Max Brod, and much of it still bears the marks of its author’s uncertainty. Kafka finished none of the three novels he started, and his final attempt, “The Castle,” leaves off abruptly midsentence.
Not only are Kafka’s fictions incomplete; many of them also contain meditations on the impossibility of completion. A messenger in one of his stories travels through one antechamber after another without ever reaching the person to whom his message is addressed. A lawyer in Kafka’s second novel, “The Trial,” drafts and redrafts a petition that is “never finished,” and a character in “The Castle” wonders, as he clambers toward the fortress of the title, “Could this path be endless?”
If Kafka’s works are as endless as the path to the Castle, it is because they teem with potent indeterminacies. In these “fairy tales for dialecticians,” as Walter Benjamin once called them, rules are enforced, then revoked; principles are established, then contravened. The behavior of a bureaucrat from the Castle can “mean that the official procedure has begun, but it can also mean that the official procedure has not yet even begun.” Defendants in “The Trial” spend hours mired in Talmudic debates about the conduct of court officials, all without coming to any consensus about what it signifies. They know they live in a world of omens, but they cannot begin to fathom what the omens mean. Before they are found guilty, much less sentenced, they are already condemned to a hell of eternal interpretation….
Although he occasionally worked in bursts, almost every word he set down in these diaries was once contested, and his twelve private notebooks (along with four sets of notes from his travels) are indices of elaborate indecision. Drafts are attempted, then aborted; passages are reiterated and ruthlessly reworked.
Rishonim were the leading rabbis and poskim who lived approximately during the 11th to 15th centuries, in the era before the writing of the Shulhan Arukh (Hebrew: שׁוּלחָן עָרוּך, “Set Table”, a common printed code of Jewish law, 1563 CE)