The pursuit of freedom is the central experience of the modern world. Emerging from the Middle Ages, man sought the freedom to shape his own destiny as an individual. Intoxicated with self-sufficiency, he entered the 19th century, but by the time that century was over he had replaced the old authorities and institutions with new ones, becoming as enslaved to the new as he had been to the old. This is essentially the experience to which Singer's work addresses itself.

Singer begins by disposing of freedom as an end in itself. Man may strive for freedom, he may even attain it—but he quickly discovers that his freedom is empty and that he is ever on the verge of surrendering his life to the promise of some new meaning….

Singer portrays men who are between faiths. Having freed themselves from the bonds of God and community, they have also freed themselves from their very identities. With their God and their community, they knew who they were and what they were expected to do; now they know nothing as certain. They are disoriented, ambivalent; they feel a sense of inner fragmentation. (p. 171)

Now, it has long been fashionable to point to the Jew as the perfect symbol for this condition of exile and alienation. Perpetual exile and a ghetto-existence on the fringe of society were supposed to reflect perfectly this being in the world without belonging to it. Singer, however—and he is certainly not alone—sees the true experience of alienation and exile not in the ghetto Jew, but in the emancipated and enlightened Jew. Within his ghetto, as Singer portrays him, the Jew belonged. He enjoyed a highly integrated and coherent life; he was bound to his God and his community by the firmest of ties and his identity was whole. It was only after the Emancipation and the Enlightenment came along—those twin processes which purported to free the Jew from the restraints of his medieval life, processes which Singer describes as the new dish of kasha that Satan had cooked up for the Jews—that the Jew was sent out to dangle uncertainly in the modern world. In that sense, Singer argues, the freedoms of the Emancipation and the Enlightenment were, in many ways, neither emancipating nor enlightening.

Ezriel Babad, for example, of The Manor and The Estate, abandons the closed cohesive world of the old Jewish shtetl in order to taste the freedom of modern Warsaw…. Significantly, Singer has Ezriel specialize in psychoanalysis—a fitting discipline, he seems to say, for a generation that feels itself beset with schizophrenia. And it is finally through Ezriel, the specialist in "nervous diseases and mental ailments," that Singer gives voice to what it is that ails modern man. Alone, independent, free of any single influence or direction, modern man becomes aware of a chaotic world alive within him, a churning chaos of conflicting drives and ambitions that Singer usually reserves for his demonic fiction…. (pp. 172-73)

The problematic nature of modern freedom as presented through Ezriel Babad is not limited to Jews. Modern European society, the society into which the Jews are released, is itself trapped between two ages and two modes of life; it suffers its own schizophrenia and its own crisis of identity. But with The Family Moskat and with Asa Heshel Bannet certain aspects of the problem which are more uniquely Jewish come to the foreground. When Asa Heshel comes to Warsaw, all he wants to do is study. As a result of the intellectual freedom of modern times, the traditional Jewish devotion to the sacred texts becomes an infatuation with secular knowledge…. But what all this secular learning accomplishes, Singer shows, is to wean the Jews away from their traditional sources, the sources that had held them together as a religion and a people and had given them their identity. (pp. 173-74)

In the best Ecclesiastes manner, Singer's modern Warsaw attests to the unaging vanity of all man's efforts to impose a meaning on his existence. That this is so is not an accident. Singer considers Ecclesiastes his favorite Biblical author, and it is not surprising that he should describe the jaded glitter of modern Warsaw in terms that bring Ecclesiastes to mind. Warsaw's Jews also set out to discover the world and its treasures, only to find all of those early promises empty, so they lapse into a position which suspects and negates everything, and see vanity and folly everywhere. They are uncertainly poised between a past that they had already rejected and a future that they no longer want. They are, in other words, walking a tightrope.

This most exquisite metaphor for the state of their precariousness is presented in The Magician of Lublin and Yasha Mazur is the tightrope walker par excellence. Yasha, a magician, a performer on the tightrope, a chameleon of many colors and shapes, values his freedom. He is afraid to be fixed by a single and permanent identity…. He has no peace, he feels himself dangling; he is walking his tightrope, he feels, but always on the verge of disaster.

The tightrope appears and reappears in Singer's work with regularity, and in changing guises. In his autobiographical In My Father's Court it is a balcony attached to his father's sacred Bet Din and overlooking Warsaw's very profane Krochmalna Street. In his well-known story, "The Spinoza of Market Street" it is a garret-room suspended between an orderly heaven above and a chaotic marketplace below. For the heroine of "The Mirror" it is a mirror standing between her native shtetl Krashnik and wicked, modern Sodom. For Yasha Mazur, as the case in point, it is a tightrope stretching between the synagogue and the street. (pp. 174-75)

Walking the tightrope is charting an unsteady course between two alternative slaveries, trying to steer clear of both…. Walking the tightrope means living outside of everything; it means being anchored in nothing more substantial than one's own isolated, "free" and very precarious self. (p. 175)

In an abrupt and surprising epilogue Yasha Mazur abandons his tightrope and encloses himself in a doorless, brick cell…. If the tightrope is Singer's metaphor for the precariousness of freedom, the brick cell is his metaphor for the security of slavery. Not that the security is total; even within his cell Yasha's doubts continue. But now he is anchored in something, his cell is meant to stand for a certain context within which he lives, a framework which shapes his life. His self-enclosure in the cell is an act of self-limitation, a recognition that he is not self-sufficient. In his Jewish cell Yasha feels free. (pp. 175-76)

What Singer shows is that the result [of the secular ideologies of the Enlightenment] was not enlightenment or progress, but slavery to human misconception. At issue here is Singer's dualistic perception of reality. As he sees it, reality is fundamentally paradoxical. It does not meet man with a series of neatly separated alternatives, but with a blend in which the contraries exist together. Man, likewise, is a paradox. He dwells a little lower than the angels and a little higher than the beasts; both aspects of his nature, inextricably intertwined, are at war with each other, and only both together constitute truth…. [While] the Enlightenment extolled its rational man, minimizing or altogether ignoring the non-rational aspect of his nature, Singer labors to show that man does not live by his reason alone.

Over the years he has evolved a steadily expanding gallery of aging—and often hilarious—Jewish scholars who, having discarded religious traditions and formulations, spend their lives inventing rational equivalents and substitutes…. Perhaps best known of these theoreticians of rational religions is Dr. Fischelson—"The Spinoza of Market Street."… He lives high up in his room studying Spinoza by day, contemplating heaven at night, wishing to live his life sub specie eternitatis—and completely detached from the teeming life of the Jewish street below. But the world is not rational, it is thoroughly unSpinozan…. Human existence, Singer argues, cannot be coerced into an all-rational mold. Dr. Fischelson's rational truths are half-truths; to work, they would need to incorporate—to marry, if Singer's symbolism is borrowed—the realities of the street. (p. 177)

[The] central burden of much of Singer's work, certainly of his historical works, [is] that life and history make a mockery of the simplistic abstractions generated by men. Man a rational creature? "Europe is full of plans," observes Ezriel Babad, "but all of them demand human sacrifice." The rational concept of universal Man also proved to be an abstraction; in historical reality man appears in groups….

Singer's thesis is … that, left on his own, man succumbs to some simplistic misconception; that, while he deludes himself that he is self-sufficient, man plunges into deeper and deeper slavery. The Family Moskat demonstrates this thesis better, perhaps, than Singer's other historical novels. (p. 178)

The messianic tradition in Judaism, and especially the tradition of false messianism, has long fascinated Singer…. [To] tell the straightforward story of this century's redemptive delusion, Singer presented to his readers The Family Moskat. But to provide a profound insight into the perennial human drive "to create a better world," he reached back into the 17th century and, in Satan in Goray, he resurrected Sabbatai Zevi.

Goray, as Singer describes it, is a little Jewish town at the end of the world, always isolated from the world. The year is 1666, according to mystical calculations The Year of Redemption, and Goray is alive with apocalyptic expectancy: the Messiah is coming, the Exile is at an end. Meanwhile, two emissaries arrive to give more precise form to the coming redemption. The first, Reb Mates, a salesman of holy scripts and amulets, is utterly other-worldly, utterly devoted to the spirit. The second, Reb Gedaliya, the new ritual slaughterer, is all worldliness, utterly devoted to the flesh. The two emissaries, representing opposite poles, demonstrate what is fundamentally wrong with man's messianic impulse. Unwilling to endure the contradictions and uncertainties of human life, he strives for perfect and complete and final solutions. But this striving breaks open the dualistic center and sends him to extremes. (pp. 178-79)

The message, spelled out in The Family Moskat and made allegory in Satan in Goray, is clear: let the dangling and precarious Jew who expects to find his identity in the modern secular world know that the modern secular world is Satan's haunting-ground.

A word about Singer's satans.

Singer's satans and demons have come under fire from critics who see them as irrelevant, at best, and sensationalistic most other times. But to Singer they are a "spiritual stenography," symbols through which he expresses his view of the human condition:

The demons and Satan represent to me, in a sense, the ways of the world. Instead of saying this is the way things happen, I will say, this is the way demons behave. Demons symbolize the world for me, and by that I mean human beings and human behavior.

Singer takes his demons from folklore (sometimes, he says, he uses his imagination; but when he uses his imagination, he says, that, too, is folklore) because, like all folklore, the symbols and images that demonology employs convey innermost beliefs and attitudes of whose existence man's rational faculties are not even aware. The result is a mythicization and universalization of what would otherwise be isolated and particular events in history. The dilemma of freedom, for example, is not solely a modern one. Man has always aimed for freedom from what restrains and limits him. In Singer's demonic fiction it takes the form of freedom from the human condition, from man's position between the beasts and the angels…. And Singer's work abounds with those who surrender to demonic voices and become exclusively ascetic or exclusively sensual, exclusively devoted to the spirit or exclusively devoted to the flesh. Singer's demons, in other words, are those impulses in man's psyche which, when perspective and discipline are lacking, begin with a necessary half of a whole and push it to its outer limit until it usurps the whole; they begin with legitimate drives and make of them all-encompassing passions. And this, in Singer's historical fiction, is precisely the function of his messiahs. They come to a society no longer sustained by its traditional framework, a society lacking in firm roots and a firm definition, and they promise perfect and complete and final solutions. Again and again the same ingredients are present: a town, or a girl, weary of the past, of the intolerable present, striving for a different tomorrow; to such a town, or to such a girl, a mysterious stranger appears and promises deliverance; the town, or the girl, follows the stranger to greater and greater perversion; the stranger is unmasked to reveal Satan.

It is to guard himself against just this chain of events that Yasha Mazur, the magician from Lublin, decides to enclose himself in his brick, doorless cell. Walking his tightrope, always on the brink of disaster, Yasha knows that he could always be persuaded to surrender his freedom, the void of his life, to the lure of some satanic promise. Enclosed in his cell he at last feels himself protected from what was the greatest folly of the modern pursuit of freedom: the folly of not seeing that a single-minded drive for freedom and self-sufficiency already carries within it the seeds of a new slavery. (pp. 180-81)

The fundamental conflict … is not between Orthodoxy and secularism, but between genuine and false slavery, between genuine and false freedom.

To Singer, freedom and slavery, to be genuine, cannot exist apart from each other. A genuine slavery permits man his freedom, and genuine freedom is possible only for those grounded in a genuine slavery. To be grounded in a genuine slavery means to be grounded in something which transcends man and his formulations, to seek not peace and certainty but truth. It means, therefore, to accept the paradoxical nature of man's existence, to have faith that life's essence lies precisely in strain and conflict and a constant making and remaking of the self. Those, indeed, in Singer's world who fare best are those who carefully thread their way through a complex and mysterious universe in which—to name but a few—body is always bound up with soul, doubt with faith, and man with God.

The stories of these men afford marvelous insight into the dynamics of genuine faith. What they show is that of all of the contradictions and uncertainties that these men endure, the paradox of good and evil tests them most severely…. What is so instructive about their predicament is that these are men who were never swayed by the secularists' pronouncements on man's freedom, but who now must stop and consider the possibility that the secularists are right, that man is, indeed, alone. It is as if men to whom secularism—the major challenge to faith in modern times—posed no challenge at all, but who had to contend with its implications once—after the Holocaust—it became a possibility. (pp. 182-83)

In other words, freedom for Singer is not freedom from but freedom to: freedom to reject a false slavery and to choose for oneself a genuine slavery. This is the story of Jacob of Josefov, The Slave.

The Slave, one of Singer's finest works, might be retitled "The Varieties of Slavery Experience." Its protagonist, Jacob, passes through various conditions of freedom and slavery…. [His journey] may be said to resemble a man's journey through life. In Jacob's case, that journey is dominated by his one overiding slavery: to God….

[Jacob's break with faith in God and his subsequent] return signifies, first of all, that faith, to be faith, needs to be freely chosen…. Jacob had to break a wrong, naive, passive slavery, in order to choose for himself a right, sober, and active slavery. (p. 185)

Throughout The Slave, paralleling the events and situations in Jacob's life, Singer weaves Biblical events and situations, thus weaving Jacob into the fabric of ongoing Jewish history…. Jacob's journey through life is taken within the framework of God and people and history and, as such, it acquires shape and purpose and a strength beyond his own to meet what comes to meet him. Every event and situation that he meets is a challenge; it is an opportunity to exercise his freedom again and again, and to choose. (pp. 185-86)