Joseph and His Brothers, page 133
Was that not a jest to set off giggles? Precisely the creature that, if one wished to put it that way, was most like the Creator brought
evil with it. Upon the advice of Sammael, God created for Himself a mirror that was not very flattering, anything but, and that out of anger and chagrin He frequently set about to smash to smithereens, though without ever taking the final step, perhaps because He could not bring Himself to thrust what He had once called into being back into nonbeing, because He felt a greater fondness for His failure than for His success; perhaps also because He did not want to admit that anything that He had created explicitly after His own Hkeness could itself be a total failure; and last of all, perhaps because a mirror is a means for self-recognition and because He would then see the consciousness of that ambivalent creature reflected in one son of man, in a certain Abiram or Abraham—see it as a means for His own self-awareness.
Judging from which, man was the product of God's curiosity about Himself—which Sammael shrewdly presumed and exploited with his advice. Anger and chagrin were the inevitable and ongoing consequences—especially in those hardly rare cases in which evil was joined with cheeky intelligence, logic, and truculence, as in the case of Cain, the founder of fratricide, whose conversation with the Creator after the deed was fairly well known and bandied about in our circles. One had not exactly cut a very dignified figure in the question One put to this son of Eve: "What have you done? The voice of your brother cries out to Me from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive his blood from your hand." For Cain had answered: "To be sure I slew my brother, and that is sad enough. But Who created me as I am, jealous to the point that on occasion my conduct becomes so dissembling that I no longer know what I am doing? Are You not a jealous God, and did You not create me after Your likeness? Who put the evil impulse in me to do the deed that I have undeniably done? You say that You alone bear the burden of the whole world, and will You not also bear our sins?" Not bad, that. Exactly as if Cain, or Kayin, had taken counsel with Sammael beforehand, though perhaps the crafty hothead had no need to do so. Any rebuttal would have been difficult, which left only a crushing blow or indignant amusement. "Begone!" came the answer. "Go your way. You shall be a fugitive and a vagabond, but I will set upon you a mark that you belong to me so that no one may slay you." In short, thanks to his logic, Kayin was let off lightly to say the least; this cannot be called punishment. Even talk about being a
fugitive and a vagabond was not in earnest, for in fact Cain settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden, and quietly set about siring children, a work for which he was urgently needed as well.
On other, well-known, occasions, punishment was meted out and, always in majestic sorrow, terrible measures taken against the compromising behavior of that "most similar" creature—just as there were rewards, terrible rewards, which is to say, exaggerated, extravagant, and outrageous rewards. Do but recall Enoch, or Hanok, and the incredible—indeed one must, in a whispered aside, say irresponsible—rewards bestowed on the fellow. In our circles the prevalent opinion, shared to be sure with greatest caution, was that not everything was on the up-and-up when it came to rewards and punishments down below and that the moral world established upon Sammael's advice was not treated with requisite seriousness. It would not have taken much, indeed at times nothing at all, for our circles to have come to the conclusion that Sammael took the moral world more seriously than He.
It could not be hidden, even had there been a desire to hide and disguise, that the rewards—being in so many cases quite disproportionate—served as a moral cloak, as pretexts for blessings that were in truth explicable only as fundamental favor, a predilection that had scarcely anything to do with the moral world. And the punishments? Here, for example, punishment was meted out, the field leveled, in the land of Egypt—apparently with regret and sorrow, apparently out of respect for the moral world. Someone—a favorite, a piece of conceit, a dreamer of dreams, a little fruit from the tree of him who had first hit upon the notion of being a means of self-awareness—had fallen into the pit, into the dungeon, into the hole, and for the second time now, because his stupidity had run wild, because he had let love, just as he had once let hate, run wildly out of control; and how pleasant that was to observe. But were we of the entourage perhaps deceiving ourselves now by taking satisfaction in this new version of brimstone?
Just between us: We did not let ourselves be deceived, not for a moment actually. We knew precisely, or at least presumed to the point of certainty, that this was merely sternness feigned out of respect for the Realm of Sternness, that One was making use of punishment, that fixture of the moral world, as a means for opening up a cul-de-sac whose only access to light was through an exit in the un-
derworld; that One, begging your pardon, was misusing punishment as a means to show more favor and raise up higher still. If we, in brushing past one another in silence, kept our radiant lashes lowered and pulled our lips down so expressively in little pursed rounds, we did so out of that insight. Punishment as an instrument to even greater greatness—that jest by the Almighty also shed light back upon the mistakes and impudence that had been the cause of punishment and "forced" Him to act, a light that had not exactly come from the moral world; for those very mistakes, that impudence, prompted by whomever, by God knows whom, had already become the means, the vehicle for being extravagantly raised up anew.
The circles of the entourage believed they more or less knew what these stratagems were all about—thanks to their, albeit limited, share in omniscience, which out of respect was used of course only with considerable precaution, indeed self-abnegation and dissimulation. And it must be added, in as low a voice as possible, that they believed they knew even more about other matters and steps taken—about enterprises, intentions, machinations, secrets of a wide-ranging nature—which it would have been a mistake to dismiss as court gossip, but to which, to be sure, it was absolutely forbidden to give voice, for they could scarcely be mentioned even in a whisper, so that the means of discussing or conferring about them verged on silence itself: a gentle flutter of the lips, those softly, maH-ciously pursed lips. And what sort of matters, rumors, and plans were these?
They were bound up with that peculiar, and though of course irreproachable, patently obvious treatment of rewards and punishments, with its entire nexus of favoritism, preference, election that called into question the moral world (itself the consequence of evil, and thus of good, having been called into being) or, in short, the creation of humankind. This in turn was further bound up with not definitively proved, but well-supported tidings—borne on barely fluttering lips—that Sammael's suggestion or whispered proposal to create a "similar" creature—that is, man—had not been the final such notion that the Throne had allowed to be brought before it; that relations between the Throne and the overthrown angel had not been completely severed or had at some point been resumed— though just how was not known. It was also not known whether, behind the backs of the entourage, a journey had been undertaken to
the cesspool, where ideas had been exchanged, or whether the banned exile had on his own found an opportunity, perhaps on repeated occasions, to leave his abode and speak once again before the Throne.
In any case he had been able to augment and enhance his erstwhile witty and intentionally compromising suggestion, although it took the form—probably no differently from on that first occasion—of provoking and stimulating thoughts and wishes that may have already been embryonically, tentatively present and needing only additional encouragement.
In order to understand what was in progress and at work here, it is necessary to recall certain information and facts found in the premise and prelude to our current story. The reference here is to none other than the "romance of the soul" briefly recounted now in the terms available there: how, like unformed matter, primal man's soul was one of the originally posited principles and how its "Fall" created the prerequisite basis for all narratable events. One can indeed speak here in terms of Creation. For did not the Fall occur because the soul—out of a kind of melancholy sensuality surprised and shocked by a primal principle dwelling in the higher world—allowed itself to be overwhelmed by a desire lovingly to penetrate formless matter still clinging very stubbornly to its formlessness, in order to generate out of matter forms by which it could achieve its physical desires? And was it not the Most High Himself who came to the soul's assistance in a struggle far beyond its own powers and created for it the narratable world of events, the world of forms and of death? He did so out of sympathy for the plight of His errant concomitant—a compassion that allows one to conclude a certain constitutional and emotional kinship of the two; and where one can conclude a thing one must do so, even if that conclusion may sound bold or blasphemous, given the fact that one is speaking of errancy in the same breath.
Is the concept of error to be connected with Him in any way? The only possible answer to such a question is no, a resounding no, and that would have been the answer of all the choirs of the entourage—followed, however, by a discreet pursing and pulling down of lips. It would doubtlessly be going too far to make the rash claim that mercifully creative and supportive participation in another's errancy is to be regarded as personal error. It would be rash
inasmuch as the creation of the finite Hfe-and-death world of forms still did not inflict even the slightest injury—or perhaps only very minor injury—to the dignity, spirituality, majesty, and absoluteness of the God who stood before and outside all worlds, so that up to this point there can be no serious talk of errancy in the true sense of the word. But it is a different matter with those ideas, plans, and wishes that now hung in the air, if only as surmises, and formed the object of secret dialogues with Sammael, during which the latter surely put on the air of someone who believed he was personally bearing a new idea to the Throne, whereas presumably he knew very well that One was already silently, provisionally contemplating that same idea. Evidently Sammael was counting on the universality of the error that says when two are taken by the same idea, that idea must surely be good.
It is pointless to beat about the bush, to talk all around the matter, any longer. What the great Sammael suggested—one hand to his chin, the other stretched out toward the Throne in peroration—was the embodiment of the Most High in some not yet extant, but mold-able chosen people, after the pattern of the earth's other national and tribal divinities with all their magical powers and fleshly vitality. It was not by chance that the word "vitality" was introduced, for the cesspool's chief argument (just as it had been when the creation of man was suggested) was the increase in vitality that the spiritual God, existing beyond and above the world, would experience— though in a far more drastic and thus fleshly sense—by following such advice. Let it be noted: the chief argument. For the clever cesspool had many, and he assumed, more or less correctly, that in any case they had all been secretly at work in the place where he now introduced them and needed only be brought to a white heat.
The emotional realm on which they now focused was that of ambition—which of necessity was an ambition for diminution, an ambition directed downward; for in the Highest Instance, where any upward-directed ambition is unthinkable, all that is left is its downward expression: an ambition for adaptation and "wanting to be as others are," an ambition to renounce the extraordinary. The cesspool found it easy to appeal here to a certain mood of stale, flat, demeaning abstractness and universality that inevitably had to color any comparison the spiritual, supraworldly God might make between Himself and the magical sensuality of national and tribal
gods, thereby awakening an ambition for vigorous diminution and limitation, for the addition of a more sensual spice to His form of life. To surrender the somewhat anemic loftiness of spiritual omni-efficacy for full-blooded, fleshly existence as the divine body of a nation and to be what other gods were—that was the Almighty's secret aspiration, his tentative deliberation, to which Sammael appealed with his cunning advice. And, in order to understand this temptation and the willingness to yield to it, ought one not then be permitted to introduce the romance of the soul, its love affair with matter and the "melancholy sensuality" that inspired it, in short, to introduce the Fall as a kind of parallel? In truth there is nothing to be introduced here—the parallel forces itself upon us, particularly in light of the sympathetically creative assistance granted to the errant soul on that occasion, from all of which, then, the great Sammael most assuredly drew malicious courage for his counsel.
Malice and the fervent desire to cause embarrassment were, needless to say, the innermost meaning of this counsel; for if man had been a general—and thereby a source of constant—embarrassment for the Creator, then His fleshly union with a given tribe of men, by assuming a vitality tantamount to biological existence, would have to bring things to a pinnacle of distastefulness. The cesspool knew only too well that such a downward ambition, the attempt to be Uke other gods (which is to say, to be a tribal god, the divine body of a nation), through the union of the cosmic God with one tribe, could never ever come to a good end—or at best might come to a good end only after lengthy detours, after much embarrassment, disappointment, and embitterment. He knew only too well what his Advisee doubtless also knew in advance: that after a perilous episode of biological vitality as the divine body of a tribe, after the dubious, if also full-blooded pleasures of a reduced earthly existence, of residing within the life force of a national entity, of being served, coddled, and enkindled by magic ritual, of being sustained by its energies, there would necessarily follow that universal moment of contrite reversal and self-reflection, the repudiation of all such dynamic limitations, the swinging of the pendulum of the beyond back to the beyond, the reclaiming of omnipotence and spiritual omni-efficacy. But what Sammael—and he alone—nourished in his heart was the thought that even this return, this homecoming equivalent to a cosmic turnaround, would of necessity—and much
to the delight of his own primal malice—be accompanied by a certain humiliation.
By chance, or not by chance, the character of the tribe chosen and molded to be His national embodiment was such that on the one hand, the cosmic God, by becoming its body and its God, not only forfeited His dominion over the earth's other national gods and became like one of them, but also ended up considerably below them in terms of power and glory—also to the delight of the cesspool. On the other hand, however, the condescension of becoming a national god, the entire experiment of enjoying biological life, took place against the better judgment and deeper insights of the chosen tribe itself, so that without its intensive spiritual assistance that reversal and self-reflection, that restoration in the beyond of dominion over the other gods of this world, would not have been possible. This was what tickled Sammael's malice. To serve as the divine body of this peculiar tribe was on the one hand no particular pleasure—as such one could not, as they say, cut a very dashing figure among the other national gods. One inevitably ended up taking a back seat. But on the other hand and in this same regard, the universal capacity of the human creature for being an instrument for God's own self-awareness grew particularly prominent in this tribe. An urgent, worried striving to determine the nature of God was innate to it; from the very beginning there stirred within it a seed of insight into the Creator's extraworldy nature. His totality and spirituality—that is, that He was the space of the world, but the world was not His space (much as the narrator is the space of his story, but the story is not his, which then offers him the possibility of commenting on it)—a seed capable of development and destined over time and by means of strenuous effort to grow into full knowledge of God's true nature. Dare one assume that this is precisely why such a "choice" was made? That the outcome of this biological adventure was as fully known to the Advisee as it was to his astute counselor? That He Himself knowingly created His so-called humiliation and edification? Perhaps duty requires that assumption. In Sammael's eyes at any rate, the droll point of this process lay in how from the very start the chosen tribe knew better, so to speak (at least in the form of that hidden seed), than did its own national God and employed all the energies of its maturing reason to help Him out of a state inappropriate to Him and return to a beyond of spiritual omni-efficacy—
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whereby it remains the cesspool's unproved assertion that the path leading back from the Fall to a home and position of honor was possible only with the help of humanity's exertions, that left to His own devices He would never had found His way.
The foreknowledge of the circles in the entourage scarcely reached so far ahead, reached only as far as whispered rumors about secret meetings with Sammael and what was discussed there; but it sufficed to hone general angelic displeasure in regard to that "most similar" of creatures into a special petulance directed against the chosen tribe now in the process of being molded; sufficed, moreover, for cautious schadenfreude at that small-scale Flood and brimstone shower that One, to One's sorrow, had been compelled to inflict upon a scion of that same tribe, who had been the object of special and far-reaching plans—though to be sure with the poorly disguised intent of turning punishment into their instrument.
