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the term the connotations of truth and sacredness which believing
Jews feel for the Torah, but which even the most fervent poststruc–
turalists will not posit about "the text"; it is not something before
which one prays; it is something one "deconstructs"!
Apparently Steiner does not realize that "the text" is important
only to those intellectuals for whom truth is still an enigma, and the
Torah, to someone who thinks like that, would be simply a set of
nonsacred opinions, about which one must reserve judgement. The
conceptions underlying realities such as "the Torah" and "the text"
are not just incompatible; they exclude each other logically.
Steiner cites Julien Benda's remark in
The Treason of the Clerics
that the scholar's truth should be more important to him than his
country; should he not sacrifice what is less to what is more impor–
tant? Now Benda, by today's standards, was very old-fashioned. He
had the old-fashioned belief that we know what we are talking about
when we talk about the "truth." What is more, he did not have the
new-fangled belief that we know what we are talking about when we
talk about "the text." For Benda never wrote about "the text," nor
can I imagine him listening with understanding to moderns or post–
moderns talking about it. Even so, Benda did not say that truth is a
homeland, a country, but only that to the intellectual, the scholar,
truth should be more important. Truth first and then France, not
France first, then truth. He never remotely suggested that the French
nation, its farmers, workers, and statesmen- not just its scholars–
put truth above the interests of France. Then how can Benda's
judgement be applied to Israel, which like France is a nation, and
has workers and farmers and statesmen, as well as scholars?
For some, the voice of the people is the voice of God; thus God,
as Stephen Dedalus remarks in
Ulysses,
can be "a shout in the street."
And Jews, shouting in the streets, but also in squares and in as–
semblies, have proclaimed the state set up in 1948 as the Homeland
of the Jews. So for them the matter is settled. But for George Steiner
it is not. The voice of God for him cannot be heard in "Long Live
Israel," shouted by Jews. Putting truth above country, the voice of
God for him has to be the voice of truth. The question remains:
where can truth be heard? It can be heard by religious Jews when
they read the Torah, but Steiner is not a religious Jew, so he cannot
hear the truth reading it with them . He can in his mind secularize
the Torah, and think of it as "the text," but in so thinking he must
further think that what he reads there is untrue. So for Jews who
