ABRAHAM’S PRESENCE


        The search for meaning (sacred/natural; not just scientific “DNA” genealogy, and “the journey of man” geographically) and wise guidance in ancient texts and oral tradition, including countless myths of creation and early genesis, is very old and practically universal:
        The Bible is special, for us, in this regard, along with the related oral tradition (respected, in particular, by the Pharisees) or simply latent wisdom which emerged over the centuries and gave us Talmudic commentaries, rival gospels, Kabbalah, and the like.
        The Greek rational-critical spirit which rose in the (Judeo-Christian) West, during the Renaissance in particular, radically questions the authenticity of literal Biblical Truth and fostered the mood of our 18th-century Founders which was often minimally believing (and ecumenical in that wise), deistic, and also apt to be open to various unofficial visions—not institutionally Judaic or Christian—emerging from marginal thinking in the past, such as Kabbalah (Zohar, Sefiroth), which gave us Rosicrucianism and Masonic ritual, very influential on our “Fathers” as well as Goethe, Mozart (The Magic Flute), Beethoven, so many others: Alexander Hamilton was especially curious, in that sense, as The Great Seal’s mystic pyramid testifies on our paper currency.  
        The rival Gospels have taken on a new interest recently, in the work of Elaine Pagels, notably.  
        The Hebraic lore is my focus here: being older than Christianity and largely suppressed, though full of the ancient inspired sap that gave us the Bible and kept flowing underneath in the ghettos, it functioned almost like dead ancestor spiritual power and surged up memorably, in the Middle Ages (via Spain’s Maimonides, Leon Hebraeus in Italy) and from then on: it haunted writers like Goethe (Truth and Fiction, etc.), Lessing (Nathan the Wise), Walter Scott (Ivanhoe: “magical” Isaac of York, Rebecca), Balzac (The Magic Skin), Dickens (Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend), George Eliot (Daniel Deronda), Edgar Quinet (The Wandering Jew), Mallarmé (Hérodiade; his letter to Redon admiring the Solomonic sage), Proust (A la Recherche), Joyce (Ulysses, Finnegans Wake), Mann (the Joseph tetralogy), Ingmar Bergman (Fanny and Alexander),  Sebald (The Emigrants, Austerlitz)…
        Proust, half-Jewish, stands out with his charming and cultured protagonist, Swann; his narrator (Marcel) looks back from his sick bed to the innocent paradisiacal childhood years in Combray (Illiers) and evokes his maternal grandfather as a pillar of strength in the family much as the church spire “summed up” the spirit of the little, ideal (though also very real) town (my Orthodox grandpa was that for me).
        The grandfather-figure is patriarchal in the personal narrative but suggestive of the larger perspective, as is the strong (doctor) father who reminds him of Abraham in one scene.  Leopold Bloom is comparably fatherly and immemorial, (like HCE, “here comes everybody”) as Hugh Kenner stated in a talk.  At the explosive opening of Finnegans Wake, the Hebraic patriarch, Isaac—at the moment of Jacob’s ruse—is there along with Celtic and other analogues.  
        One could refer to much more in this rich, Judeo-Christian vein—painters such as Rembrandt, Chagall; composers such as Bach, Franck—but the foregoing will suffice, for the moment: it leads to a few observations about our current cultural situation:
        Along with the generously open-spirited writers there have been the usual blind or blinkered souls who cling to narrow Christian “country club” exclusivism.  F. R. Leavis chided George Eliot for writing about Jews!  Samuel Huntington left Jews out of his The Clash of Civilizations, as Toynbee had done.  Jeffrey Hart, in a letter, smugly made fun of Abraham at about the same time realistic Arthur Miller spoke, to Charlie Rose, of returning to “Abraham’s bosom.”  
        Peu importe stunted vision will always be with us.  Far more significantly, the ancestral Abrahamic “olive tree” (Saint Paul, Romans) is still spreading its spiritual branches (and “seed”) in many of us, whether Gentile—adopted children, grafted-on branches, as Paul put it—or natural, as predominantly in the first years of Christianity.
        Finally, my strong intuition is that we need that deeply rooted presence now in a time of signal perplexity and an enormous challenge to his “seed” everywhere.