DANlLOKIS
107
it) did not exclude certain hedonistic principles from its code: con–
trary to all expectation, vodka, Indian hemp, and the pleasures of
the flesh occupied the same rank as reading, travel, and pilgrimages.
All Frankel sees here - and I feel he comes close to the truth - is the
low point in the intersection of art and morality where forces clash in
their most elemental form, "beyond good and evil": the true moral
dilemma begins and ends with the issue of vanity; all else lies beyond
the moral sphere. The parallels Frankel draws with Buddhist doc–
trine and bonze practice - in which the pleasures of the flesh raise no
barrier to the absolute known as the
Tao-would
seem to be a conse–
quence more of private speculation on the part of Ben Haas than of
the direct influence of Oriental wisdom. The fact that Ben Haas was
seen in a disreputable district of Prague at the age of thirty (by which
time he had established his moral code once and for all) cannot,
therefore, be considered a scandalous contradiction of the principles
set forth in his
Summer and the Desert.
"Art is knowledge, and
knowledge is asexual," Frankel cites as one of Haas's basic assump–
tions. "Asexual, that is, amoral ." In other words, the learned Ben
Haas, who was both poet and moralist, who combined two con–
tradictory vocations, tried to reconcile the asexual knowledge of art,
so precious to all experience, with his ethical principles, which he
refused to dilute:
"If
one takes a person at his word, though it be the
Sacred Word, one risks a moral fall graver yet than if one breaks a
commandment prescribed by the Word." This brief quotation from
the early Haas contains the simplest explanation of one of the basic
ideas that years later would spawn the heavy, convoluted, barely
comprehensible philosophical doctrine he expounded in cabalistic
jargon weighed down with neologisms and a number of concepts
whose meaning escapes us. Yet we cannot quite agree with Frankel
when he states that .the obscurity of Ben Haas's later teachings is
merely the consequence of doubt, the fruit of "maturity." (There are
many obstacles in the way of issuing a critical edition of Ben Haas's
complete works, the first being the presence of certain rabbis and
moralists on the committee charged with their study and publica–
tion.)
Although the event that interests us here and that we mean to
relate in brief has no direct connection with Ben Haas's philosophical
doctrine; it derives, as insignificant as it may seem, from the nature
of his teachings and calls into question an entire complex system of
values. This is a sort of moral, if you will.
