Access Deferred

Whereas in the years after the Second World War, Kafka was mostly read in existentialist and universalist terms, scholars and critics writing in the 1980s and 1990s were increasingly interested in his relationship to Judaism, which they mostly conceived in terms of a threshold and an interim period in biographical, historical, and cultural terms. Whether as a paradigmatic Jewish pariah who truly does not belong to any community or as a failing seeker of truth who, like one of his protagonists, sits longingly at the window and waits in vain for the message of the divine emperor, whether as a timid Zionist who, like Moses, will never set foot on the promised land or as a Luftmensch who has lost the foundations of Jewish tradition without having found new ground, Kafka became the epitome of the disoriented city dweller, the quintessential homeless person, the alienated individual in the modern age.

What is striking in the recent reception of Kafka’s writings, however, is not only the increasingly precise biographical and cultural-historical research on Kafka’s Jewish environment in Prague or interpretations that reveal Kabbalistic references in his writings, but also readings that underline his distance from the Jewish religion. One then associates him with heresy, gnosis, marcionism, Paulinism, inverse or negative theology, or “atheology.”² Kafka’s undeniably idiosyncratic attitude to Judaism is regarded in these interpretations as a rejection of a religion that is seen as legalistic, repressive, and authoritarian. But turning to passages in his texts where he refers explicitly to the Jewish textual tradition and exegesis, the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, a different picture emerges. There, too, we find hardly any mention of a successful search, a fulfilled hope, or an arrival in the longed-for land—yet the missed, denied, or rejected access does not necessarily prove to be a failure. Rather, it is the idea of a thoroughly Jewish way of life.

This is already laid out in Before the Law. In many respects, the doorkeeper’s answer to the request for admission and the consequences that the man from the country draws from it can be read as a primal scene of Kafka’s relationship to Judaism. As has often been noted, the “man from the country” is a literal translation of the Hebrew am ha’aretz, the designation for a person who is ignorant of the law. The fact that the am ha’aretz is outside the law because of his ignorance implicitly places him in opposition to the Talmid Chacham, a scholar of the law. However, it is far from clear that the Talmid Chacham would try to enter the law. Perhaps only a person ignorant of the law, an am ha’aretz, can want to enter the law, someone who does not know that in Judaism access to the law does not consist in entry, who does not understand that infinite study in the Talmudic tradition is the encounter with the law itself. A Talmid Chacham would know the Talmudic saying Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof (“Justice, righteousness, strive for it!”). The law is to be strived for, but this saying also implies that it cannot be fully attained and fulfilled. There is no final entry.

The Unfulfilled Moment

“I am the end or the beginning.”³ With these words, Kafka locates himself and his time in a space between the past and the future. As a reversal of Revelation—“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End” (Rev. 22:13)—Kafka’s dictum undermines the claim to totality and the certainty of this Christian creed. His statement, however, is neither a simple reversal nor a negation of it. By replacing the “and” with an “or,” Kafka conveys an uncertainty about his present, and thus implicitly his conception of the present in general as something unfulfilled. He invokes a mode of uncertainty that deprives the end of its finality and the beginning of its foundation. By introducing doubt as an oscillating movement into the interval between end and beginning, the statement sketches a notion of the present that not only subverts all wholeness, but also keeps open the moment on the threshold between past and future.

Søren Kierkegaard, to whom Kafka refers repeatedly in his diary, called the Jews “the most unfortunate of peoples, because they are situated between memory and waiting, namely between two unfulfilled presences.”⁴ Kierkegaard’s remark goes back to one of the most fundamental differences between Judaism and Christianity. Whereas Judaism is characterized by the commandment to remember the past and wait for a Messiah who is yet to come, Christianity, for which the Savior has already arrived, harbors the experience of a “fullness of time,” a moment that once took place and is repeated in every believer. Jewish thought lacks the Christological idea of the pleroma, literally the “fullness,” in which time is fulfilled and, as it were, completed. However, the resulting figure—a postponed, imperfect, and unfinished present—is seen not as the cause of misfortune, but as the possibility of a living care for the world. Although the longed-for, commanded, or strived-for goal remains inaccessible, at its threshold a potential space opens up in which the waiting, questioning, studying, and hoping mode of being of the man from the country unfolds before the law. This mode of being suggests the idea of a human existence that is flawed and unfulfilled, but for that very reason meaningful.

Abraham Before Mount Moriah

An impulse similar to that in Zum Scheintod is expressed in Kafka’s idea of an “other Abraham.” “I could imagine another Abraham.”⁷ This first sentence of a letter Kafka wrote to Robert Klopstock in June 1921 is an implicit response to his reading of Kierkegaard’s reflections on the biblical forefather and the sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling. For Kierkegaard, Abraham is a “knight of faith” who submits to God.⁸ Kafka’s idea of a different Abraham refuses this obedience:

“I could think of another Abraham, who—of course he would not make it to the patriarch, not even to the second-hand clothing dealer—who would be ready to fulfill the demand of the sacrifice immediately, willingly like a waiter, but would not be able to make the sacrifice after all because he cannot leave home, he is indispensable, the economy needs him, there is always something else to be arranged, the house is not finished, but without his house being finished, without that support he cannot leave, as the Bible also acknowledges, because it says: “He ordered his house.” […] The next day, I thought a great deal about this Abraham, but they are old stories, no longer worth mentioning; especially not the real Abraham [...]. Not so the above Abrahams, who are standing on their building site and are now suddenly supposed to climb Mount Moriah [...]. So all that remains is the suspicion that these men deliberately do not finish their houses [...] so as not to have to lift [their face] and see the mountain that stands in the distance.”⁹

Kafka imagines an Abraham who does not go to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his beloved son. Like the biblical patriarch, Kafka’s “other Abraham” is a pious man who could not accomplish the sacrifice. This Abraham, in an imaginary response to God, argues that he “cannot leave home” because he is needed there. Kafka invents Abraham’s excuses for the fact that he postpones the observance of God’s command, that he can fulfill it only after the completion of his house, “but not now”: his “other Abrahams,” now in the plural, have become an existential attitude. These Abrahams “are standing on their building site and are now suddenly supposed to climb Mount Moriah.” An indignant exclamation mark is heard here: the divine decree reaches them in the midst of their care for their house, for their business, for their world, and they are now commanded to give up all that in order to go up the mountain in the service of God and make the sacrifice! As much as Kafka’s “other Abrahams” would have been willing to obey, they are too busy with their “building site” to follow God’s call, and thus defer the sacrificial act. The last sentence of the scene explains this potentially endless postponement. Referring to his other Abrahams who resist the invitation of the call to sacrifice, Kafka speculates: “So all that remains is the suspicion that these men deliberately do not finish their houses [...] so as not to have to lift their face and see the mountain that stands in the distance.”¹⁰

Abraham’s claim that there is always still one more thing to take care of in his house suggests an analogy with Kafka’s own way of writing. Could this house— not a real home, but an infinite building-site—be similar to the Bible and its endless interpretations or, perhaps even more, as Walter Benjamin suggests, to the Talmud? This potentially infinite text, with its meticulous instructions for everyday life and its endless reflections on the organization of the common world, would then offer a place for the homeless to dwell. And maybe even lessen human fear and trembling. For, just like Kafka’s Abraham, endless studying—just like Kafka’s infinite writing—would allow us to avoid what awaits us when we lift our eyes and stare at nothing but the “mountain in the distance,” that terrifying place of martyrdom and sacrifice. It is precisely this understanding of the biblical commandment set out in the Talmud that, contrary to the view of the Apostle Paul, makes humans not miserable, trembling sinners, but world-builders—or, come to that, authors who write unfinished stories and imagine Abrahams who deliberately do not finish their house.

The Postponed Messiah

In his 1959 essay "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism, Gershom Scholem famously characterizes Jewish existence as “a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished.”¹³ Whether this is meant as a criticism of the lack of participation by Jews in historical events or as an affirmation of their awareness of an unredeemed humanity is debatable. Scholem traces the mode of deferment back to the messianic idea in Judaism, which longs for redemption as much as it keeps it in check: the supposedly infinite need to prevent the coming of the end is, for Scholem, both the greatness and the “constitutional weakness” of Jewish messianism.¹⁴

Kafka’s “other Abraham” as well as his forgetful tower-builders reinforce this idea, which aligns with the foundations of the Hebrew Bible and its commandment to care for the world. It finds a surprising counterpart in Kafka’s most famous statement on Jewish messianism, the hope of final access to a redeemed world at the end of time: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the very last.”¹⁵ Kafka’s distinction between the last and the very last day is probably only permissible and meaningful as a language game in literature: the last day, which invokes the end of the world including the last judgment, does not seem to be quite the end of things here. It also seems as if Kafka is reflecting on the incompleteness of his writing, which continues more or less blithely after every seemingly final conclusion, after every decision made. It would hardly be surprising if the very last day, after having turned the last day into the penultimate day, were to suffer the same fate—that is, to be only the day before the last one. In this sense, the infinite postponement would not be just a literary game, but would correspond to the “life in deferment” defined by Scholem as the epitome of Jewish existence. With the small difference of literature: because it is only in its performative, thus processual, temporality that the very last can be shifted to the last and then to the penultimate day, on which everything can still happen. Only the unfinished, the uncompleted, with all its expectations and fears, but also its contingency and sense of possibility, can remain open, and not only for the last things, but for the penultimate ones, the ordinary things of imperfect everyday life.

All the texts discussed here seem to invert the biblical source to which they refer, but in the end, they affirm—with slightly different emphases—the worldly dimension that is already inherent in the biblical text. Kafka’s references to Moses, Abraham, the Tower of Babel, and the Messiah are therefore neither heretical, gnostic, nor Pauline. Although they do not remain faithful to the biblical stories literally, they return to their spirit and reveal their underlying worldly orientation. They are not transgressive, as heresies are, nor do they deny the value of worldly existence or attribute the existing evil to a malevolent deity, as a gnostic attitude would. They do not call for the abolition of divine Law, as in Paulinism, and do not declare the absence of God to be the flip side of theism, as in “atheology.” They do not negate, they do not submit, and they do not give up. However, God is not entirely absent from these stories: Moses does not negate his encounter with God; he only turns his attention—and ours—to the people to whom he descends and the stories that he brings. Abraham does not rebel against God’s commandment; he merely indefinitely postpones the act of sacrifice to which he was called for the sake of an unfinished world-building. The non-completion of the tower and human discord are attributed not to the divine punishment of a vengeful god, but to imperfect human dealings with one another. That “we don’t really want to know” what happened to Moses on Mount Sinai and instead receive his stories from the mountain, that the other Abrahams keep their eyes fixed on the endless construction sites so as not to have to see the holy mountain in the distance, that the builders of Babylon forget their storm on heaven while keeping both its memory and its threat alive in literature, also reflects Kafka’s conception of his own way of relating to the world, his quasi-religious commitment to his writing, which is directed at turning to the world against all odds. The failure to reach the goal, inherent in all the texts discussed here, corresponds to the fundamental view of the Jewish textual tradition that the Bible is “not in heaven” but on earth.¹⁶ It indicates a direction, not a result. It does not invite us to access an ultimate truth, but, like Kafka’s man from the country before the law, to enter into a lifelong confrontation with it and everything it stands for.

Vivian Liska is a Professor of German Literature and Director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Since 2013 she is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Her research focuses on modern German literature, literary theory, and German-Jewish thinkers and authors. She is editor of the book series Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts (De Gryuter). Her recent book publications include When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (Combined Academic Publishers, 2009) and German-Jewish Thought and its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy (Indiana University Press, 2016).

This essay can also be found in the catalog accompanying the exhibition ACCESS KAFKA