“Chapters of the Book of the State” by S.Y. Agnon

Abstract

Unlike the orthodox stance, which did not assign the state any religious value, for Agnon the state’s spiritual transcendence is a path leading to theology. In his view, the project of the constitution of the Jewish state in Hebrew literature is highly problematic, and in “Chapters of the Book of the State” he wishes to show that the representation of the Jewish state within Hebrew literature in the modern world of Zionism is an almost impossible task. Because of the unavoidable secularism of the Zionist state, Agnon kept his distance from the political as it is materialized in the Jewish state, the form of which he strongly criticizes in “Chapters of the Book of the State”. The two approaches – the Zionist linguistic break from holiness, and the Zionist continuation of the holy language, which Agnon wishes to rehabilitate in his stories – are both correct and incommensurable. For Agnon, the only feasible literary solution to this aporia is a satire that portrays the state as a caricature. Irony offers an opening for Agnon’s satire, through which he can represent the aporia of the Jewish state: like irony, the state, too, is written in a holy language that both exists and is extinct, that is, is both within history as well as outside history. Hence, the relation to political messianism is contradictory: On the one hand, “the beginning of our redemption”; On the other, the fulfillment of messianism is so deferred that it is not political anymore, since Agnon strongly opposes the notion of a linkage between Jewish messianism and the Zionist present.