I’m moved to be part of these two days dedicated to Stephane Moses, who was, for me, a major teacher, and a very close friend. We used to speak in Hebrew or French, so the passage through English is already an echo of my title, “Stephane Moses – Le Passeur Among the Ruins”, a conversation that crosses to languages. Yet I’ll thanks to this assembly of friends and colleagues of Stephane Moses I’ll propose to continue my conversation with Stephane in an imaginary meeting.
When I chose the term, “Le passeur” for my title I had in mind the Hebrew word העובר, stemming from the root ע.ב.ר from which is built the verb, לעבור, to cross, that leads to the noun עברית Hebrew and עברי the Hebrew-person or Hebraic, while in the background is Abraham, the first passeur, the first figure who crosses, arriving from afarמעבר הנהר from the other side of the river, and by his coming out and crossing toward he becomes the founder of a people, the nation of , עברים the Hebrews.
Certainly, one of the core features of Stephane’s trajectory and destiny was that of crossing, of coming from afar and choosing to walk towards. His alya in 1968, moving from Paris to Jerusalem, was an existential choice, embodying at the same time Stephane’s intellectual trajectory, that of a constant crossing between European and Jewish thought which does not erase or negate the footprints of the path. On the contrary, the very point of crossing became Stephane’s point of observance and the core of his analysis. The gap or the schism between the worlds, the place of controversy or influence, of catastrophe and creation, both tragic and fertile.
We are ten years after we lost the vital and vivid presence of Stephane Moses, but his voice still reverberates, still influences the ongoing, changing present. Like the portions of manna that according of the Zohar Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai prepared before his death for his disciples, there have been at least nine books of Stephane Moses’ last writings that have been published since he passed away, thanks to the extraordinary work of Liliane Moses, with the help of Emmanuel Moses.
On the contrary, the very point of crossing became Stephane’s point of observance and the core of his analysis. The gap or the schism between the worlds, the place of controversy or influence, of catastrophe and creation, both tragic and fertile.
Stephane Moses was an exemplary analyst. His thorough and attentive reading never appropriated the writer’s voice, but rather gave it a new reverberation. Crossing the abyss of death he bestowed the texts with new life, an afterlife – as echoed by the Hebrew maxim: דובב שפתי ישנים (resonating the lips of those who sleep), or described by Proust’s through the Celtic mythology (in the famous Madelaine passage), when he compared memory to the resurrection of a dead soul dormant in tree trunk, that would awake only if someone walks by that tree and, recalls it. In his readings Moses opened the folds of a text to point of a secret, giving it life, and leaving it untouched, without exposing it too much to the light. Just revealing that there is a secret of life there, leaving us it with all its mystery and power thus exposed.
Stephane Moses’ work and life always crosses as well between the world of historical and political reality and the world of ideas. He was always aware and to the loaded historical moment, to the aftermath of the Shoah, this cosmic and cultural breaking of the vessels, and he was looking for its announcing hints and for the sparks scattered from it.
Today, ten years of his absence, I would have loved so much to sit and talk with Stephane, continue our singular conversation – either on a Friday night, around the Shabbat table, with Liliane, Emmanuel, Anna and Rachel, and the grandchildren now – those extraordinary moments of Shabbat together when time beyond time hovered around the table, or maybe on the terrace of a cafe in Rechavia, one of the many that have opened since. How much I would have loved just to sit with Stephane, talk or think together, in moments of silence, with his nodding of the head, pushing his slim hair aside, looking behind his glasses, and brooding, lengthily, on a question that was voiced, always urgent and eternal. How much I would have loved to sit with Stephane and open farther questions we have not formulated yet.
I would ask him about our gaze beyond the schism of the Shoah. Can we analyze writings that preceded it with the same terms as those which came after? How should we consider, for example the “luxury of pessimism” (if I can call it thus) of Bialk, Kafka or Uri Zvi Grinberg – is it the genius of prophesying – or even wishing – the end of the Shtetl and of Eastern European or German Jewish life? Or, what was the post war hope, or that of the foundation of Israel (echoed by Stephane’s own choice of immigrating) seen from their outcomes today? Is the No Pasaran, echoed by Paul Celan, still reverberates, and how? And what are the voices that still haunt us, emerging in Celan’s Stimmen: “Voices sneaked into the smooth waters green when the kingfisher dives at instant buzzes.” (In the translation of Felstiner)?
In this imaginary meeting I would tell him about the research group I lead in Van Leer Institute dealing with shaping the memory of the Shoah, (Transmitted Memory and Fiction 2012-2015) and how these very words of Celan were quoted by me, as a call summoning us, at the opening session of the research group. Celan’s image of the pool covered with thik green of forgetfulness and unconsciousness that the kingfisher dives through and opens, was ours, as we all carry in our subconscious the memory of the Destruction. It works on us constantly, emerging in myriad forms, personal as well as political, present at the core of the tension between the three Abrahamic religions, and the urgency to pierce the repression, to lay it open as much as possible, as our basis for shaping a future.
If Stephane were alive, he certainly would have been with us in the multi discipline and generation group. And he might have taught us his unforgettable reading of Celan’s Stimmen pointing poignantly, as only he did, to the lines reverberating Jacob’s voice:
Jacob’s voice:
The tears,
The tears in a brother’s eye
One stayed clinging, grew
We dwell insight.
Breathe, that
It comes loose.
I will never forget Stephane’s shuttering reading of that stanza, pointing to the tear, which is also in the eye of Esau, עשיו, according to the Midrash. The tear in the eye of the unbeloved brother, the brother who was chased out from the lineage. A painful image that goes into the very deep controversy between Christianity and Judaism, as a reminder that at the beginning of the schism was a tear of pain and injustice, a pain that Celan recognizes, as a visceral component of the tragedy.
His faculty to ask the question both “from Europe” and from within the texts of the Jewish tradition is a precious contributing to the cultural scene. This is a dimension developed by French Jewish intellectuals after WW2, during which it emerged as a unique form of spiritual resistance.
We would sit together, and Stephane will also enclose his reading of Celan’s poem: Die Pole, as published in a posthumous art book accompanied by Lilian’s engravings. Here Stephane is reading three poems of Jewish German poets writing about Jerusalem, Else Lasker-Schuler, Rose Auslander and Paul Celan (an essay translated by Shimon Sandbank). I would share with him my reading of Die Pole (in Jerusalem Place of Desire, Journey to the Myth) and quote the question Jacques Derrida, a shared friend, asked me about the line: “Say that Jerusalem is“. Derrida was wondering, “In what language would you say Jerusalem, who would claim the language to say Jerusalem? German, Hebrew, Arabic? What would be the language, and how to say Jerusalem?” And with Stephane we would maybe evoke Celan’s last poem, that ends, crossing between languages, with the word, Shabbat.
Stephane might have turned the conversation to some echoes from his monumental study “The Angel of History” and the different modes taken by the urge of cutting through the present historical and political moment towards a possibility of transcendence, of redemption. We would have in mind Stephan’s magisterial study of Rosenzweig’s notion of redemption here and now, a constant redemption that is in time, in the moment, not the Hegelian one at the end of time, not the scatological, not the messianic, but what Stephane calls the (attente ), the waiting, the constant possibility of the emergence of the Messiah in the present, by means of liturgy and ritual that cut through the present moment and the vicissitude of time into a time out of time, like the Shabbat, which is “a sort of World to Come” and yet occurs every week.
But what about the angel of history gaze at Jerusalem? Here I would have asked Stephane, the passeur, a question I did not have the opportunity to ask him: “Do we go on looking at the question from far away, like Abraham that stands in front of Jerusalem and sees ”את המקום מרחוק (the place from afar).” There is a very special sensitivity in thinking about Jewish modernity from afar, from Europe, like Rosenzweig, Benjamin or Levinas, or from Jerusalem as Scholem and Stephane Moses chose to do. And what is discovered by the crossing, by this shift of point of view?
I’ve learned from Stephane about the late writings of Rosenzweig, as he was coming into terms with Zionism, by pointing to a yearning that does not stop once “you have arrived”. That is not fulfilled or consummated by the mere “return” and clinging to the Place of the linear and messianic Zionist narrative. A yearning to the Place that continues within it, a release from the messianic urge, another mode of transcendence. Stephane speaks in this context about the “inner exile” of Scholem, and farther opens in his essential reading another option, both of German Jewish literature and in Zionism, needed so much within the Israeli culture. His faculty to ask the question both “from Europe” and from within the texts of the Jewish tradition is a precious contributing to the cultural scene. This is a dimension developed by French Jewish intellectuals after WW2, during which it emerged as a unique form of spiritual resistance. It took decencies before this attitude reached Israel. As it deepens so would permeate, I believe, the reading and the impact of Stephane Moses oeuvre.
In this way, I wish I could sit with Stephane and discuss together a theme that occupied my thinking and writing lately, that if the Sabbatical Year, shmita. Release, as the effort to introduce it to thinking about Zionism and the Israeli political and cultural reality. We would discuss Rosenzweig’s emphasis of mitzvoth by which the human attitude shapes nature, rather than enhances it. I would share with Stephane my enthusiasm discovering how the shmita, the release of possession and of toiling the land, which has not been kept during the years when the Temple existed (engendering, according to the Talmud, the punishment of the Babylonian Exile) was piously kept by the poor farmers of the Galilee during the centuries after the destruction of the Temple. Beyond sovereignty the shmita – the release of possessing – became their mode of a sanctifying the Place. Holding by a release. Sacredness of the place which is linked to time. We might have fallen into silence then, as a crucial dimension of our conversations, brooding in this open space of thought, whether this dimension is possible in the actual political and economic situation, and how.
And with his power to cross, to be the passeur, advancing backward into the future while looking at the debris of the old world, as in Benjamin’s metaphor, he is a kind of an angel of History. But the wind blowing in his wings carries hope beyond time and the ruins of destruction. An ancient and original hope, so personal and public as embodied in Stephane Moses’ unique mode of thought and being.
This imaginary conversation will painfully stay virtual. Yet the world of Stephane Moses, his many books published during his life, along with the nine printed after his death, along with the abounded translation of his oeuvre into many languages, are more present than ever. And with his power to cross, to be the passeur, advancing backward into the future while looking at the debris of the old world, as in Benjamin’s metaphor, he is a kind of an angel of History. But the wind blowing in his wings carries hope beyond time and the ruins of destruction. An ancient and original hope, so personal and public as embodied in Stephane Moses’ unique mode of thought and being.
Because Stephane Moses’ lesson reverberates for me as a belief in the power of a person to make a change in the world. Like in the audacious teaching of the Hassidic master, Rabi Nachman of Brasslav, when he interprets the verse: גיבורי כוח, עושי דברו לשמוע בקול דברו”” They are [his angels], who excel in strength, to make [do, act according to] His words, to hearken to the voice of His words.” (Psalms 103). In his reading, Rabbi Nachman replaces the angels by the Zadikim and claims: “The Zadikim, when they want to hear something from God, first of all they make His words, they produce them by their deeds… and then they give them over to God Who says them, for them to hear” (Likutei Moharan 9. 19). Man creates God’s sayings, is responsible for creating God’s voice.
This was for me the great lesson I received from Stephane Moses, the power to create and make a change. A lesson so needed after the Shoah, so needed in the young state of Israel and in Jerusalem, where he lived. Each meeting with Stephane was always not only an intellectual lesson but an existential one, accomplished with great intention by deeds and action within life. Thus, our conversation always held a unique tremor and urgency. It was a transmission that made a real and palpable change. It was the gift of a rare conversation that will cross over time and death, for me and for many others who would follow the path of Stephane Moses, walking along the footprints of the undefeated passeur.