ARTHUR A. COHEN
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omous self is no longer secure but battered, the old forms insuf–
ficient, and the reaching for formal structure more deeply buried
in the consciousness of the race of mankind can be brought forth.
Schonberg and Stravinsky both strive for the integration of music
and the voice; Kafka affirms an ambiguous reading of the traditional
assumptions and Western culture mythology that requires that each
of the deep myths of the race- the expulsion from Paradise , the
tower of Babel, the binding of Prometheus-be rescrutinized and
reinterpreted . The challenge to the modernist revolution is pressed
by the late generation of the twentieth century as both a critique of
the modernist enthronement of the autonomous ego (and in this Sig–
mund Freud joins with Kafka in an unsettling entente) as well as an
assertion that something has been lost, that values have been elided,
that vital connections of human creativity to the eternal orders of the
universe - if there are such anyway - have been pushed aside . The
critique could be pressed by the postwar European generation
because if modernism entailed the kind of human desolation and
destruction wrought by four years of war and devastation , then of
what use is free and untrammeled creation?
This is the basic situation . Judaism has both much and little to
say about this predicament. As doctrine, Judaism can be used-we
now understand - to criticize any position one finds objectionable.
There is a rich enough literature of interpretation in Judaism to both
validate and obliterate individual creativity and artistic expression ,
to subdue the ego to the task of study, to make holiness a sufficient
model of human excellence and perfection as to render the in–
dividualistic achievement of the nineteenth century both irrelevant
at the least or idolatrous in its extremity . But such a critique by ex–
clusion is a dangerous procedure. We cannot rid the world of the
ideologically disagreeable by arbitrary fiat. Literature and the arts
will not go away or, more to the point, Jews who make literature and
art will not stop doing so simply because canonic Judaism has not
devised a theological language for authenticating their enterprise. At
the very least, even if beauty is a minor priority of the Jewish spirit,
well behind righteousness, mercy, and truth, those Jews who cannot
rise from the aesthetic to the religious (as Kierkegaard and later
Franz Rosenzweig recommended) will continue to be obsessed with
making the beautiful as a pale image of the truth. The Jewish task in
making art is, however, much more subtle and complex than being
satisfied with beauty, when it is truth that is commanded. Giving
prizes to Jews for doing good work is part and parcel of precisely the
