DREAMERS
304'
that absolutely alien world an absolute orphan, a Lost Son. When
the Jew dreams himself in the Gentile world, it is as the preferred
offspring of Jacob, which is to say, of Israel- betrayed by his breth–
ren, but loving them still, forgiving all. When the Gentile dreams the
Jew in
his
midst, on the other hand, he dreams
him
as the vengeful
and villainous Father: Shylock or Fagin, the Bearded Terror threat–
ening some poor full-grown
goy
with a knife, or inducting some
guileless Gentile kid into a life of crime. But Shylock and Fagin are
shadows cast upon the Christian world by that First Jewish Father,
Abraham, who is to them circumciser and sacrificer rolled into
one-castrator, in short.
In the deep Jewish imagination, however, Abraham is seen al–
ways not at the moment of intended sacrifice, but the moment
after-releasing his (only ritually) threatened Son to become himself
a Father, and the Father of a Father, to beget Jacob who will beget
Joseph. Abraham
and
Isaac
and
Jacob: these constitute that paternal
triad which possesses the mythic memory of the Jews. And beyond
them there is for us no further Father, only Our Boy, Joseph, who
never becomes (mythically speaking) a Father at all--only makes
good, i.e., provides salvation for the Gentiles and
naches
for his own
progenitor.
The Gentiles cannot afford the luxury of
O_UT
Joseph, however,
having an archetypal Son of their own, who denies his actual Jewish
father ("Let the dead bury their dead"), called-appropriately
enough-Joseph, too. How like and unlike the figure of the first
Joseph is to that Gentiles' Son of the Father, the mythicized Jesus
Christ, whose very Jewishness is finally sloughed off in the exportable
archetype he becomes. Not for
OUT
Beloved Son a crucifixion and a
translation to glory only after death. Our Dreamer, too, may begin
by leaving his father's house on a mission to the Gentiles; but the
temptations he must resist are the temptations of this world, not the
next. Specifically, he must elude not the clutch of Satan but the
grasping fingers of the Gentile woman who lusts for him; and sur–
vive the slander with which she punishes his rejection of her alien
charms. And his reward for virtue is to become a success in this
world, the unredeemed here and now (not some New Heaven and
New Earth, where he will sit at the right hand of Power), ruled
over only by the powers-that-be: those fickle Pharaohs whose favor
