[In the following chapter from a collection of essays discussing literary manifestations of Midrash, an ancient biblical form of exegesis, Shaked demonstrates how Agnon's early story “Agunot” uses forms of intertextuality borrowed from old Hebrew traditions.]

I

From love of our language and adoration of holiness I abase myself before the words of the Torah, and starve myself by abstaining from the words of the Sages, keeping these words within me so that they may be fitted altogether upon my lips. If the Temple still stood, I should take my place on the dais with my fellow poets and daily repeat the song which the Levites used to chant in the Holy Temple. Now, when the Temple is still in ruins, and we have neither priests at their holy work nor Levites chanting and singing, I occupy myself with the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, the Mishnah, the Halakhah and the Haggadot, Toseftot, Dikdukei Torah, and Dikdukei Soferim. When I look into their words and see that from all our goodly treasures which we had in ancient days nothing is left us but a scanty record, I am filled with sorrow, and this same sorrow causes my heart to tremble. Out of this same trembling I write my fables, like a man who has been exiled from his father's palace, who makes himself a little booth and sits there telling of the glory of his forefather's house.

(“The Secret of Writing Fables. The Sense of Smell”)

This is a poetic expression of Shmuel Yosef Agnon's fundamental attitude towards the relationship between modern literature and ancient texts.¹ For Agnon, intertextuality is neither a mere literary device nor an unconscious phenomenon. Rather it is the very source of his creativity, perhaps even its main subject. Modern Hebrew literature, according to Agnon, is nothing less than a substitute for the sacred texts; the absence of sacred literature is the source of his inspiration. Moreover, the author sees himself as the heir of the holy scribes whose works were only a communal creation, and whose anonymity, which foregrounded the texts and hid the identity of the individual authors, was an integral part of their work.

As a modern author, therefore, Agnon continues the ancient tradition in his work because it has become part of his cultural heritage. But as a modern author, who can only imitate the language of the canon and cannot enact its content as part of a living ritual, he cannot be the true bearer of that canon. Therefore, Agnon does not see himself as a transmitter of a great cultural lineage, built layer upon layer, beginning with the Bible and continuing through the Mishnah, the Talmud, and all the works which stem from them. Instead he views himself as belonging to a different culture altogether, one which inherits a multi-textual tradition it can no longer carry on. This culture relates to these earlier texts, but, because of the new social context, these texts can be made real only by means of invented fables—fables, in other words, which are not the sacred fables that the righteous of each generation were accustomed to tell, but which are, rather, secular chambers, in which only the echoes of the canon are heard. Hence the work of the modern writer, claims Agnon, serves as a secular substitute (a “booth”) for sacred tradition (the “palace”). In order to understand Agnon's works in general, and the story with which I shall be concerned in particular, this connection between holy origins and secular expression must be kept in mind.

II

To a greater degree than that of any other writer in modern Hebrew literature, Agnon's work is based upon intertextual connections.² Indeed, Agnon conceives of an ideal addressee for whom the traditions of sacred literature are totally native, one who can discern the relationship between the fable and the holy canon. Agnon's implied addressee, however, is not simply the reader who is close to those traditions and is able to recognize them. He is one who is able, like the author himself, to distinguish among them and even to create oppositions between them.³ In order to understand Agnon's work, one must read his text not only as a link in the chain of sacred tradition, but also as an anti-text to this traditional literature.

Agnon's text will be misunderstood, therefore, not only by the addressee who is completely unfamiliar with the textual tradition to which the author is referring, but also by the addressee who credulously reads the text as a link in a chain of sacred texts. The author writes a great many stories which appear to be sacred texts or “quasi-sanctified” texts (or even a kind of Apocrypha), stories in which the author, by various devices, hints that his text is indeed a link in the chain of sacred texts. “Agunot” [“Deserted Wives”] (1908), and Ve-Haya he-Akov le-Mishor [And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight] (1912) are two such works. The first is prefaced by a kind of pseudo-midrash, while in the second Agnon opens each chapter with quotations from the traditional literature, the narrative as a whole (through the use of the introduction, the style, and the inserted tales) being structured on the frame of “tales of believers” (the name given to traditional religious and moral stories dealing with awe of heavenly power and deep religious faith). The same literary approach can be found in many later stories as well. But whether, in fact, Agnon's works only contain hints pointing towards sacred texts or are actually written “as if” they themselves are quasi-sanctified, it is clear that the tales' creative power arises from the constant tension between the text itself and the sanctified or semi-sanctified literary tradition (if we take into account the later literature of the religious community) which it invokes. To examine this tension in Agnon's work, let us turn to his first story, “Agunot,” which in many ways determined Agnon's subsequent literary development, thematically, structurally, and stylistically.⁴

III

“Agunot,” by Shmuel Yosef Czazkes, was the first story published by the young author in Palestine, where he had immigrated in 1908. It appeared in one of the first periodicals of the Second Aliyah, Ha-Omer, vol. II, no. 1, 1908. It is significant that the author used part of the title of this story for his nom de plume and his surname. This is a symbolic act which, to my knowledge, is without parallel in Hebrew literature. Indeed, Agnon so identified himself with the name of his story that what we have here is an extension of the fictional into the real, the fictional narrative becoming a kind of perush (interpretation) on the existential and poetic experience of the author, an interpretation which has forced him to displace the chief element in his identifying sign. The story, then, might be thought of as a form of midrash on the new name of the author.

Taking the name from the deed or the deed from the name is, of course, a well-known technique in Jewish literature: “And Joseph called the name of the firstborn Menasheh; For God, said he, hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house. And the name of the second called he Ephraim; For God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my afflictions” (Gen. 41:51-52). (The play here is upon Menasheh and nashani—“made me forget,” and Ephraim and hifrani—“caused me to be fruitful.”) The two names are used to summarize two events which happened to the father of the family. The name is a sign of the deed. When, therefore, Agnon relates the title of his story to himself, he continues this tradition of the ancient literature, implicitly declaring that his life is a commentary on the story, just as the story is a commentary on his life. By affiliating what seems to be a legendary or fictional experience with the actual identity of a person who is within and without the fiction at one and the same time, the author, especially through his signature, identifies the text as something which belongs to him, and to no one else.

IV

This phenomenon of the text as commentary, mediating between fact and fiction, is replicated in a number of ways in “Agunot.” The most important of these for our purposes is the relationship that is established between the opening or introduction to the story and what the “author” (as he refers to himself) calls “the fable,” “a great tale and terrible, from the Holy Land.” The opening section is built along the same lines as many Hasidic tales, which open with “a quotation from the writings,” pointing, generally, towards the works of the holy Ari, Rabbi Isaac son of Solomon Luria (1534-72), the head of the kabbalistic community in Safad.⁵ The Ari's works were left unpublished. But the “quotations” from the Hasidic books which were attributed to him were cited with a show of great authority, even though it was widely acknowledged that their authenticity was quite often doubtful. Agnon revives this form of the “quotation from the writings,” what I would call the pseudo-quotation, supporting his fable with words which seem to have a sanctified status, almost an ordination. Furthermore, the sacred authority of these citations extends itself into the fable, the fable becoming a kind of exemplum of the imaginary quotation. The quotation, however, is not reducible to the purely imaginary. Imaginary in fact, and yet constructed of similarly “authentic” passages of sacred literature (which are themselves of dubious authority), it is, we may say, a genuine pseudo-quotation because the well-informed reader can grasp not only the authenticity of the unfolding of its elements, but also the spirit in which it is invoked. It is a text derived from sacred texts, which has many of the characteristics of those texts, but which is itself outside the sacred context.

The opening of “Agunot,” therefore, continues the midrashic form of writing signalized by Agnon's choices of name and title. The addressee, as he reads, is half-willing to suspend his disbelief and imagine that this is not a secular work by a secular author, but a religious work in which the implied author carries on the midrashic activity of former generations. The pseudo-sacred opening imitates a tradition in which, the relationship between a secular story and the sacred canon having been revealed, the story itself takes on a species of sacred and sanctified significance. The fictionality is self-fulfilling: secular and sacred are interwoven, and we do not know if the sacred sanctifies the secular, or the secular sanctifies the sacred. Indeed, the relationship between secular and sacred, and the fictive or real status of each, are perhaps the central themes of the tale.

Specifically, the opening follows in a tradition of midrashic writing which depended upon the Song of Songs and the midrash on the Song of Songs. It renews the general motif of the relationship between a metaphorical (or symbolic) character who represents the Jewish people and an anthropomorphic image of God, while it recapitulates a particular stage in the midrashic exegesis of that text where, in Song of Songs Rabbah, this connection is made suggestively to express the intimate and even reciprocal relationship between the people and their God. This relationship is made explicit later in the exegetical tradition, as, for example, in the Lurianic Kabbalah where we find a detailed reciprocity between the deeds of the people and the deeds of God.

Now, the midrash that Agnon writes is simultaneously an interpretation of the Song of Songs and of the midrash on the Song of Songs. In the opening of Agnon's midrash the following phrases from the Song of Songs appear: “Behold, thou art fair, my love, behold, thou art fair” (4:1); “they smote me, they wounded me, they took away my veil” (5:7); “my beloved withdrew and was gone” (5:6); “I am lovesick” (5:8). Citations from the Song of Songs, furthermore, appear not only in the opening but also in the body of the story where they take on increasingly complex significance. On the one hand, their application, like the fable as a whole, moves from the abstract or conceptual level of interpretation to a more literal or reified one. On the other hand, they draw into the body of the story the conceptual significance they had possessed in the opening. (I am referring to such verses as “My beloved descended into the garden,” as implied in “Agunot,” p. 31, “the time of the singing of birds is come,” p. 31, “I sleep but my heart waketh,” p. 35).⁶

These verses, and phrases close to them, are the central elements of the intertextual connection. By appearing first in the opening and then returning in the body of the tale they suggest that the story as a whole looks in two directions. On the one hand, it refers to the nearer context of its own secular or fictional elements. And, on the other hand, it points toward the more remote context of its pseudo-sacred opening.⁷ The more remote context establishes the relationship between the events of the near context and the traditional literature of past generations. It accumulates the interpretative meanings of the generations and causes them to issue in new events and new interpretations.

The introduction, of course, does not remain on the literal level of the love story told in Song of Songs. It quickly proceeds to evoke the midrash of the Song of Songs, which compares the people of Israel to the “fair one,” God to the “beloved,” and which interprets other elements of the love story in the light of this comparison. In this way, for example, “Behold, thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair,” elicits the following midrash: “Behold, thou art fair with precepts, behold thou art fair with deeds of kindness, behold thou art fair in positive precepts, behold thou art fair in negative precepts; behold thou art fair in the religious duties of the house, with the ḥallah, terumah, and tithes, behold thou art fair in religious duties of the field, with the gleanings, the forgotten sheaf, the corner, etc.” (Midrash Song of Songs 4:1). Or another example: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem … what will ye tell him? That I am love-sick. As a sick person yearns for healing, so the generation in Egypt yearned for deliverance” (5:8).

These midrashim do not appeal in their original form in Agnon's text. They are, however, painstakingly implied in a discourse of authorial asides which compounds new expressions out of the interpretative echoes of many different sacred texts. This process begins in the opening of the story, where, for example, the pseudo-midrash being created substitutes the expression “a thread of grace” (which, so far as I have been able to determine, is not found in the traditional texts) for the phrase “a thread of mercy,” which is indeed repeated in various well-known midrashic contexts, as, for example, in Hagigah 12b:

Look down from heaven, and see, even from Thy holy and glorious habitation. Ma'on is that in which there are companies of Ministering Angels, who utter (divine) song by night, and are silent by day for the sake of Israel's glory, for it is said: By day the Lord doth command His lovingkindness, and in the night his song is with me.

Resh Lakish said: Whoever occupies himself with (the study of) the Torah by night, the Holy One, blessed be He, draws over him a chord of lovingkindness [“a thread of mercy”] by day, for it is said: “By day the Lord doth command His lovingkindness”? Because “by night His song is with me.” And there are some who say: Resh Lakish said: Whoever occupies himself with the study of the Torah in this world, which is like the night, the Holy One, blessed be He, draws over him a chord of lovingkindness in the world to come, which is like the day, for it is said: “By day the Lord doth command His lovingkindness, for by night His song is with me.”

(Compare also B. Megillah 13a and B. Tamid 29a.)

The motifs of the “prayer shawl, the hangings, and the weaving,” which appear in the concrete image of the prayer shawl which is woven from the good deeds of the people of Israel by God Himself for the Congregation of the people of Israel, are similarly found in various forms in different midrashic sources. For example, the motif of “the apparel of the Shekhinah” appears in the Zohar III, Shelach Lecha 163b: “When the Shekhinah is in the pale blue she prepares for herself an outer covering of the same pale blue which was found in the Sanctuary, etc.” And it appears in earlier and later versions, for example in The Book of Comfort by the tenth-century writer R. Nissim of Kairouan, or in the kabbalistic book of morals, Shevet Musar, by R. Elijah, son of Solomon Ha-Kohen from Izmir, where good deeds are compared to a garment which the naked soul is awarded as a consequence of its fulfillment of the commandments and for other praiseworthy deeds:

Precious is the light and the upper (heavenly) garment created by the light of the Torah and the performance of its commandments, for through the commandments a precious, spiritual garment is woven, lighting the body of heaven in its clearness; the soul, leaving this world naked of bodily cover, hovering, ashamed, seeing itself naked, immediately puts on this clear, light-giving garment, a garment it had made for itself in the world of flesh through Torah and the commandments, and is overjoyed, seeing itself in the garment of Kingdom.

(Shevet Musar 35, 274-75.)

One could present a long list of sources which would show clearly that Agnon's pseudo-midrash is assembled from authentic materials which themselves provide varying contexts and interpretations. Concepts such as “grace and mercy,” “the Congregation of Israel,” “in her youth in her Father's house,” “the Temple of her Sovereign and the city of sovereignty,” “neither been sullied nor stained,” “the power and the glory and the exultation,” “the prayer shawl is damaged,” “evil winds [spirits] blow,” “and they know they are naked,” “wandering and howling,” “groans and cries,” “darkest melancholy-Mercy shield us!”—all these and more acquired different meanings at different moments in sacred literature, from the midrash through to the late mystic literature (of the Hasidim). There is no need to go over each concept, nor to make a detailed analysis of the compounding of several concepts into units. But as these multiple perspectives come together in Agnon's text—indeed, as they exist separately within different midrashim—they hint at a relationship of reciprocity between the heavenly and the secular, between the Congregation of Israel or the Shekhinah (or the heavenly Spheres) and the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He (or other Spheres in the scheme of Spheres) as He manifests Himself in affairs of this world. As long as the stream flows from below (the stream of commandments and good deeds), the stream from above continues to flow (the testing of immanence) and harmony exists, a harmony which the Congregation as a whole, and every individual in it, feels. When this stream is impeded, generally because of an event in the lower world of flesh, an interruption of the flow occurs. Harmony, which is simultaneously erotic and cosmic, is disrupted, and there is a kind of fall in the lower world, which will not be corrected until, miraculously, the harmony is restored. This disharmony has multiple manifestations: in the area of personal relations (where pairing becomes separation); in the area of the Spheres (where the masculine Spheres are alienated from the Sphere of Kingdom, which is the Shekhinah, while Judgments and the strength of the devil's camp increase); and in the area of the relations between the people and its God (where Exile overcomes Redemption).

Some of these patterns stand out in the quotations cited above (good deeds lead to unification of Creation, to the satisfaction of the Creator, and to the weaving of the garment which clothes the soul in good deeds), while others are to be found in the general store of meanings known to every “ideal” addressee, one who is intimate with this literature. Agnon's pseudo-midrashic opening, therefore, is both a precis of a sacred text and a narrative of a cosmic story. It suggests that a state of harmony, which originates in the reciprocal relations between the two heroes of the drama (God and the Congregation of Israel, or the Sphere of Glory and Majesty and the Sphere of Kingdom), gives way to the destruction of this harmonic state because of some negative, human factor and to a condition of longing for restoration of the original state (very much as in Romantic longings for lost perfection). Agnon accepts the premise that in sacred literature we find the permanent and known laws of the cosmic drama. These laws govern, as well, the strange game played between the midrashic assumption that “all is foreordained” and “we are free to choose.” The cosmic process is realized in human action, just as every human action is an expression of the cosmic process. Reciprocal relations between these two processes are themselves expressed in the relationship between the opening and the tale.

V

As I have begun to show, semantic elements which link “Agunot” with sacred literature are found not only in the opening but throughout the story. Some of these are developed into motifs. Others stand on their own and, by virtue of the opening, are rendered open to conceptual glossing, based on the significance of their appearance in combination in the sources. Since the alternatives for explicating them cannot be limited with any certainty, the text's meaning remains unfixed within a field of intelligible significance.⁸ The polysemousness of the textual units leads one back to a multitude of integral cultural contexts (such as the Bible, midrash, Talmud, Zohar, kabbalah more generally, the Ari, the Moral Books, Hasidic writings). The choice of one specific implied text as the base line of explication (a choice often reflecting the limitations of the addressee) leads to one kind of interpretation, but it does not necessarily eliminate others suggested by other implied texts. Examples of such exegetical quantities are: “ante-room and mansion of glory” (31), “the harp of David” (31), “but all this pride was inwards” (31), “the garden” (31), “the evil one intervened” (32), “a great mansion” (32), “a hall for prayer” (32), “no part of him was free of it” (34), “an empty vessel” (34), “on her couch in the night” (35), “the taper” (35), “like a lyre whose strings are rent” (36), “the Guardian of Night” (36), and many others. Each phrase has a rich and differentiated semantic history in Jewish culture and religion. The intervention of the devil in Job is not the same as the intervention of the devil in the kabbalistic literature and later Hasidic works, and so on. In “Agunot” this lattice of cited and pseudo-cited phrases creates an intertextual network, drawing after it entire systems of connotations and values. The opening implies that the tale reflects back on a paradigmatic situation and leads forward to a paradigmatic meaning (not fully specified or fulfilled) which replicates the evolution of meanings in the intertextual field. The story, therefore, is not only the tale of Ben Uri, Dinah, Ezekiel, and Freidele. These characters express as well a sacred drama of harmony and disharmony, redemption and exile, unity and disintegration, innocence and the fall, all of which unfolds in the ongoing history of Jewish literary forms, where sacred becomes continuous with secular, divine reality with fictional representation. The continuum grows on and on but the principle of its growth—as perhaps of midrash as a whole—is a denial or blockage of fulfillment, what Agnon conceptualized as aginut.

VI

To explain this as clearly as possible I turn now to the mysterious concretization of the title, “Agunot,” in the tale itself. On the face of it the title may be regarded as a misnomer. Agunah is defined in the halakhah as a married woman separated from her husband who may not divorce him because it is not known whether he is dead or alive. Agnon does not apply this halakhic meaning in his story. The four possible couples in the story either do not marry or marry and divorce in accordance with halakhah. Ben Uri does not marry Dinah; Ezekiel does not marry Freidele; Freidele marries a man in the distant diaspora; Ezekiel and Dinah marry and divorce. In other words, there are no clear cases of aginut in this story. And yet a condition of disharmony such as might be thought to be created by aginut does exist; and, as is appropriate to the concept of aginut, it seems to be related to the improper pairing of couples. Thus, according to the story, it is not the law which determines proper pairing—and its consequences. Rather it is the emotional relationship of the individuals to these pairings. Had each of the participants found his or her true partner, harmony might have been established. Had Dinah married Ben Uri and Freidele married Ezekiel, all would have been well. The disharmony of the state of aginut, therefore, must be said to be here actually created, and not, as one might expect, palliated, by law and custom, and the major antinomy emphasized by the structure of the tale is thus the conflict between true marriage and marriage arranged by society. It is for this reason that the rabbi, who has been an agent of these disharmonious couplings, must be exiled.

If we return from the tale itself to the opening, it becomes apparent that cosmic order has been deranged because of a disturbance in the emotional order which is itself a faithful account of an order of cosmic coupling. The customs and norms generally accepted in the congregation bring about a tragic shift in the cosmic order, which is also the order of redemption. According to Agnon, the inherent conflict is between the Jewish tradition in its social form and a system of saving values embedded deep within this same tradition.

The tale itself evokes three additional conflicts which might also be likened to the state of aginut: that between Diaspora and the Land of Israel, between Exile and Redemption, and between Life and Art. These conflicts are connected, first and foremost, to the ghostly insubstantiality of the characters' representational value. Each of them beckons onward to a wider circle of meanings. But much as the title of the story, from which the ghostlike author derives his family name,⁹ remains without a definite referent in the events of the story, so the ever-widening circles of reference frequently invert or subvert their previously suggested meanings. Clearly, for example, there is a relationship between Ben Uri and the biblical Bezalel Ben Uri, the builder of the Ark, who is a kind of archetypal craftsman in Israel, a craftsman who built for all time—or did he? Ezekiel's name is connected to the Prophet of God's word—and to the doom of Exile. (“But Rabbi Ezekiel? His feet are planted in the gates of Jerusalem and stand on her soil, but his eyes and his heart are pledged to houses of study and worship abroad, and even now, as he walks in the hills of Jerusalem, he fancies himself among the scholars of his own town, strolling in the fields to take the evening air”: p. 41.) Dinah's name is related to frivolous behavior between man and woman, as in the story of Dinah and Shechem the son of Hamor, and as in the midrashic commentary on that story: “And Dinah went forth, the daughter of Leah, of whom it is written, ‘The king's daughter is all glorious within’” [Ps. 45]—“And Dinah, the daughter of Leah went forth; she was not the daughter of Jacob. The daughter of Leah: as it is written about her mother that she is a gadabout so she, too, is a gadabout, etc.” (Midrash Tanḥuma, Vayishlakh, 5-7). Freidele's name, while unrelated to any specific textual antecedent, is significant for its Yiddish form. The Yiddish diminutive unquestionably locates her among the Dispersed.

In similar ways the attraction between Ben Uri and Dinah holds out the promise of building the sanctuary and the Ark in the Land of Israel. Ben Uri is a native of the Land. His Ark may bring about the establishment of Sire Ahiezer in the Land, Sire Ahiezer who went up from the Diaspora in order to become established in the Land of Israel and to strengthen both learning and holy work there. But all these hopes are cut off totally. The failure, in fact, of the pairing of Dinah and Ezekiel, whom Sire Ahiezer chooses as her groom, is also the failure of his “redemption.” Further, the failure of this pairing also becomes the failure of the return to Zion, just as Ezekiel's return to the land of Israel is the failure of his “pairing” and his failure as a scholar. Students will no longer come to him. The Ark, which is a sort of metamorphosis of the female figure (according to Midrash Song of Songs 4:4, and also 12: “And through whom did he give the Torah, through his two breasts—these are Moses and Aaron”—and later on, they are “the two Tables of the Covenant”), becomes an inverted metaphor. Instead of the woman being compared to the Ark of the Law, the Ark is compared to a woman (“To what might the Ark have been compared at that moment? To a woman who extends her palms in prayer, while her breasts—the Tables of the Covenant—are lifted with her heart, beseeching her Father in Heaven”: p. 36).

The pattern of inversion continues. Analogies between Dinah and the Ark appear throughout the story. Thus, it is said of Dinah: “the doves fluttered about her in the twilight, murmuring their fondness in her ears and shielding her with their wings, like the golden cherubs on the Ark of the sanctuary” (pp. 31-32); and of the Ark: “On the hangings that draped the doors of the Ark, eagles poised above, their wings spread, to leap toward the sacred beasts above” (p. 34). The two exist side by side, and Ben Uri imbues the Ark with spirit, until Dinah (after the Ark has been overturned) causes it to lie like “a body without a soul,” and she herself becomes “an unspotted soul gone forth naked into exile” (p. 36).

A tragic exchange occurs here: Ben Uri is matched with the Ark in place of the woman who it would seem is intended for him; Dinah harms the Ark as if it were a woman, her rival. The same exchange has other consequences. The sanctuary is not built properly; the grandee from the Diaspora does not establish himself in the Land of Israel; Redemption recedes further into the distance.

In the tale itself we find a concatenation of unfulfilled matches, characters who do not establish themselves in the Land of Israel, Redemption which has been postponed, and the failure to grasp a chance of human fulfillment. The artist, who because of his work does not devote himself to the human connection which might have brought harmony into the world, epitomizes all these. The breakdown of possible harmonious relationships, which does not permit the community to fulfill its social and national objectives, is figured in the reciprocal relationship between the tale itself and intertextual elements that appear in the tale, which, in turn, returns us to the meaning of the opening. The obstruction represented in the paradigm of the fall, which causes cosmic or metaphysical disharmony, also causes social disharmony and the delay of national redemption.

VII

Underlying both opening narrative and the tale there is a text which, even as it does not appear explicitly, is implied both in the opening and the tale. Finally, this text is also rendered implicit in the epilogue, which once again introduces what we might call a superreal component into the story and, in fact, creates the deepest connection between the different elements of the text. In various midrashic commentaries we find a motif of the perfect pairing similar to that which we find in Plato's Symposium. Thus, for instance, the development of the well-known parable in Genesis Rabbah 8: “Rabbi Jeremiah, son of Eleazar, said: ‘At the hour that the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He created the first man, he created him as an androgyne, as it is written “male and female created He them.”’ Rabbi Samuel, son of Naḥman, said: ‘At the hour that the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He created the first man, He created him with two faces, and sawed him through, and made him double-backed, one facing this direction and one in the other.’” And in the continuation of the same chapter: “He said, ‘in the past Adam (man) was created from earth and Eve created from Adam (man).’ From here onwards it is said: ‘in our image and after our likeness.’ There is no man without a woman; there is no woman without a man. And both of them do not exist without the Shekhinah.” And in chapter 68: “A matron asked R. Jacob son of Halafta: ‘In how many days did the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He create the world?’ He said unto her: ‘In six days, as it is written (Exodus 31) “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth.”’ She said unto him, ‘What has he been doing from that hour to this day?’ He said unto her: ‘The Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He sits and makes matches, this man's daughter with that man. That man's wife with this man, etc.’”

These early sayings are elaborated in mystical ways in later midrash, frequently endowing the relations between man and woman with cosmic meaning. The following well known example of such elaboration is from the Zohar I 5b:

Another explanation refers “His fruit was sweet to my taste” (Song of Songs 2:3)—to the souls of the righteous who are the fruit of the handiwork of the Almighty and abide with him above. Listen to this: All the souls in the world, which are the fruit of the handiwork of the Almighty, are all mystically one, but when they descend to this world they are separated into male and female, though these are still conjoined. And look at this: the desire of the female for the male creates a soul, and the desire of the male for the female, and his clinging to her, bring(s) forth a soul; and he incorporates the desire of the female and takes it in; and the lower desire is taken up into the higher desire and becomes one thing, without separation. And then the female takes in all and is impregnated by the male; their two desires are conjoined. And because of this all is mixed together, this in that.

When the souls issue forth, they issue forth as male and female together. Subsequently, when they descend (to this world) they separate, one to one side and the other to the other, and the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He mates them—He and no other, He alone knowing the mate proper to each. Happy is the man who is upright in his works and walks in the way of truth, so that his soul may find its original mate, for then he becomes indeed perfect, and through his perfection the whole world is blessed.

And for this reason it is written: “His fruit is sweet to my taste” because He blesses through making whole, and “that the whole world will be blessed through him,” because everything depends upon the actions of the human being, if he is righteous or not righteous.¹⁰

Even without a detailed explication of this passage it is clear that its meaning is based squarely on a quotation from the Song of Songs, and on several of the chapters of midrash which we quoted above. The topics have been transposed from a conceptual exegesis, backwards one might say, to a level of understanding that is concerned with the movements of the Heavenly Spheres. Here abstractive commentary has been recycled into the processions of phenomenal-noumenal being. Thus, for instance, Tishby explains the first portion: “Souls are created in the coupling of the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He—Glory—with the Shekhinah. And of the over-abundance given to the Shekhinah by the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He for the creation of souls, she says: ‘And his fruit was sweet to my taste.’” In the next section the chapter describes what happens, what results, in the world of human souls as a consequence of the events in the heavenly Spheres. The coupling of the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He, says Tishbi, brings about the coming-together of the souls which were united above in the world of spirits, but those who are not deserving may lose their rightful partner, the one created with them in the holy coupling. A whole man is one who returns to his former paired-unity. (See above “he becomes indeed perfect.”) And the perfect couple brings blessing to the Shekhinah and draws from her blessing to the world in their coupling. Of them the Shekhinah says: “And his fruit was sweet to my taste,” which means, the coupling of the souls which are the fruit of the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He gives me pleasure.¹¹

This is a harmonious and phenomenological understanding of the erotic ideal which connects perfection created in the heavenly Spheres with perfection in relations between men and women. In a correctly ordered world, all species should have existed in permanent pairs, but Adam and Eve's sin caused a breakdown of this harmonic order. The coming-together of split souls in this world is fraught with manifold difficulties. Only he whose acts are desirable can be blessed in coming-together with his ancient partner without hardships, with the help of the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He.¹²

This myth is at the foundation of our story and is perhaps more important than all the other implied texts, both in the opening and in the tale itself. It determines that the ideal coupling is the desired state, while the imperfect coupling is the state of the world. The tale itself does not tell an unusual story; it reflects a given, everyday situation. The need to correct this situation creates the eternal longing for harmony which characterizes all “deserted” souls (agunot). Ben Uri's music, a social order which creates improper matches, the conflict between art and reality—all of these are necessary obstacles through which the myth is concretized, the myth which hints at a desired harmony but points to the reality of disharmony. In Agnon's hands this myth expresses romantic agony and romantic irony: the suffering of deserted souls, those who cannot find their partners, and the irony created by the gap between longings and the frustration of longings. It recreates the internal connection between the opening narrative and “the tale itself,” between the paradigm and the concretization of the paradigm, which in itself incorporates the mythic foundation of that same paradigm.

VIII

The unraveling of the tale is important insofar as it establishes the connection between the tale and everything which emerges from the implied paradigm of the opening, which is based upon the kabbalistic coupling myth. The unraveling of the tale begins with the marriage of Ezekiel and Dinah. The saying of the Sages, “When a person takes a wife to himself, all his sins fall away,” through which the rabbi absolves Dinah after her confession, is not fulfilled in her own life. The coupling does not take place (“And neither drew near to the other all that night”); the marriage is not consummated because the two souls are not meant for one another. Each was meant for another. The divorce contract presented by the rabbi is nothing more than an halakhic expression of what actually exists in the domestic life of the couple. The match of the two souls fails. It throws up a barrier which causes the community (through the rabbi) to accept responsibility for the breakdown.

The opening narrative and its mythic foundation forge a connection between the tale and the life of the community. Erotic disharmony is a disharmony between parts of the community (the Land of Israel and the Diaspora) which brings about a breakdown in the process of communal redemption. (“It was not long that Sire Ahiezer left Jerusalem with his daughter. He had failed in his settlement there; his wishes had not prospered”: p. 42.)¹³

The rabbi who, it would seem, is responsible for the breakdown in the marital order accepts responsibility for the fact that the community, through enforcing its norms (i.e., marrying a rich man's daughter to a scholar), caused a breakdown in the coupling of souls (the erotic attraction of the woman toward the creative figure). Ben Uri, logically then, is exiled to a foreign place because he too has participated in the breakdown of the coupling of souls in his preference for a woman-substitute (the replacement of the soul by the work of art) to the real woman. And so all of the characters in Agnon's story become agunot, lose their rightful partners and places. The rabbi himself becomes a lost soul, searching for that which will restore to the world what has been lost because of him (or because of the community). All of the stories of the rabbi in the epilogue—searching for a young painter (the reincarnation of Ben Uri), wandering across the sea on a red kerchief with an infant child in his arms, or staring into the eyes of little children in the houses of study—all these are stories with a strange messianic character. Whoever imposes upon himself “the obligation of exile” is looking for a way to emerge from the state of exile, inasmuch as he lifts up his eyes to a messianic solution which will bring redemption to the whole world. “Do not touch my messiahs. These are the babes of the house of study” (B. Shabbat 119b). It is possible to understand the search for the lost child as the rabbi's attempt to atone for the sin of placing an obstacle before true coupling, thereby preventing a child from coming into the world (who might have been the messiah). On the cosmic level the obstacle in the path of the coupling creates the universal disharmony which delays the Redemption and increases the burden of the Diaspora in the life of the nation.

IX

There are no direct parallels between the paradigm of the opening or the mythic paradigm which functions as the foundation of the whole story and “the tale itself.” The tale of the pairings which failed (as a consequence of the norms of society and its failure to absorb the creativity of the artist into a pattern of human creativity) stands on its own and is a story of “the deserted souls” who have not found their proper partners and place. The story as a whole is also a concretization of the experience of the author who associates himself with the essence of the tale. By identifying himself as a romantic figure, cast about from Exile to Redemption, and from the Land of Israel to the Diaspora, the author repeatedly hints that he too is engaged in an eternal erotic quest which will never find satisfaction.

On the other hand, the opening and the myth of a mystic coupling that is left unconsummated, as well as the intratextual relationship that is transformed into an endlessly intertextual one, emphasize that the tale is a concretization of a tragic paradigm. This is the paradigm of the text, or of the pseudo-sacred text, which connects the actions of the people of Israel with the Lord of Creation, or connects the coupling in this world with the ongoing coupling in the Spheres. This relationship secures the connection between the concepts of “love,” “art,” “exile,” “redemption,” “diaspora,” and “the Land of Israel,” on the one hand, and such concepts as “the exile of the Shekhinah,” “days of Messiah,” “the Shekhinah,” and “the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He,” on the other.

The extraordinarily complex intertextuality of this story makes it susceptible to a form of criticism which Hebrew literature, with its tradition of midrash upon midrash, invites in a particularly urgent way. In this work, and in other works of Agnon, intertextuality of a special kind is patently the condition and the theme of its literary being. Only an author who declares that he is a kind of heir to the “poets of the Temple,” and who “occupies himself with the Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, the Mishnah, the Halakhah and the Haggadot” can write works which extend the continuum of sacred literature, even while those newly composed works stand in direct contradiction to it. Agnon's is the intertextuality of aginut. By actualizing “the holy paradigm” in the tale, he creates a story of frustrated love which profanes the sacred and sanctifies the profane.

Notes

1. On the general question of Agnon's poetics see G. Shaked, Agnon's Narrative Art (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Sifri'at Po'alim, 1973), pp. 13-29.

2. Many fine scholars have taken up the question of intertextuality in Agnon's writing, whether they give it this name or some other. On intertextuality in “Agunot” see H. Weiss, Between Open and Hidden Levels of Meaning in Hebrew Short Stories (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1979).

3. I clarified this concept in my book, cited above, pp. 89-132.

4. See the important interpretation of Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 57-63.

5. I would like to thank Yehuda Leibes, who kindly assisted me in the identification of these texts and in defining some of their functions.

6. All the quotations in the Hebrew text are from “Agunot,” Elu Ve-Elu (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1953), pp. 406-16. All quotations in the English are from “Agunot,” trans. Baruch Hochman, Twenty-One Stories, ed. Nahum Glatzer (London: Victor Gollancz, 1970), pp. 30-44.

7. I am using the term intertextuality here according to the propositions described by Jonathan Culler in the work of Lourent Jenny: “he proposes to distinguish intertextuality proper from ‘simple allusions or reminiscence’: in the latter case a text repeats an element from a prior text without using its meaning; in the former it alludes to or redeploys an entire structure, a pattern of form and meaning from a prior text”: The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 104.

8. We can thus harmonize two different interpretations such as those presented by Isaac Bacon and Orna Golan. Bacon understands the story in terms of the problems of the artist and bases his argument mainly on the connection between “grace and mercy,” art and love, using midrashim which support this interpretation. Golan interprets the story as the failure of the Second Aliyah (Ben Uri!) which built the sanctuary (the place) before the Ark (Jewish values). She cites various midrashim on the “Ark of the Covenant,” and on the characters of Dinah (as the daughter of the tribe of Dan) and Ben Uri (the tribe of Judah), who could have been the parents of the Messiah. See O. Golan, “‘Agunot’ and the Second Aliyah” (Hebrew), Mozna'im 32 (1971): 215-23; and I. Bacon, “On Shai Agnon's ‘Agunot’” (Hebrew), Mozna'im 46 (1978): 167-79.

9. This is a technique which reaches its peak in the stories “Edo and Enam” and “Ad Olam” (“For evermore”), in which Agnon uses the first letters of his name, ayin and gimmel, to indicate that the characters in the story are part of his personality. In And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1912) he also uses this technique in the character of Menashe (Mashkiaḥ) Chaim (the “Forgetter of Life”), and Kreindel Charny (“Atarah Sheḥorah” = Black Crown).

10. Mishnat ha-Zohar, ed. I. Tishbi (Jerusalem, 1961), pp. 627-28.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Another myth, that of H. N. Bialik in Scroll of Fire, also creates a connection between the erotic separation of men and women and Exile.