106
THE STORY OF THE MASTER
AND THE DISCIPLE
PARTISAN REVIEW
What follows took place at the end of the last
c~ntury
in
Prague, "city of mysteries ." The event-ifit can be called such-has
been described, with negligible variations and modifications,
by
many authors, and I shall keep to the version provided by Chaim
Frankel- the advantage of his narrative residing in the fact that it
recapitulates the views of other disciples who have written abd\.lt the
Master. Once we have set aside its heavy-handed disquisition!! on
faith , morality, Hasidism, disquisitions interspersed with frequent
quotations from the Talmud and Frankel's own quibblings, the story
comes down to this:
The learned Ben Haas (born Oskar Leib) began to write
poetry, in Hebrew, at the age offourteen. In about 1890 he retllrned
from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and settled in Prague, where he
gathered a group of like-minded scholars around th() journal
Ha- Yom,
which was reproduced by hand in as many cQpies
<!,S
there
were disciples. Ben Haas taught morals and
liter~tllre.
His
teachings , set forth in numerous papers and articles
~nd
published
in part only recently (thanks to the same Chaim Frankel); rest on a
moral dilemma that goes back to Plato and meW be SUlllmarized
thus : art and morality are based on two divergent premises and as
such are incompatible. One might even claim, with Frankel, that
all
Ben Haas's oeuvre, poetic as well as philosophic<IJ, represents an at–
tempt to overcome this contradiction. He &ttempts to soften
Kierkegaard's "either/or," even though the examples he takes from
the history of ideas-from that of literature, primarily-show the
dilemma to be virtually insurmountable . "Art is the work of vanity,
morality the absence of vanity ," he repeats at several points, as he in–
terprets the lives of great men from King David to Judah ha-Levi
and Solomon Ibn Cabirol . The circle headed by Ben Haas (some say
it had five members , others seven) set itself the goal of refuting the
dilemma by word and deed; that is, of submitting "in the very heart
of poetic temptation" to a rigorous code of morals which, as Frankel
points out, was based on the Judeo-Christian tradition, talmudic
postulates , Kant, Spinoza, and Kierkegaard, yet was not devoid of
certain "anarchistic elements ."
If
we have understood Frankel cor–
rectly, however, the "rigorous moral imperative" (as Ben Haas called
