The modern popularizer of religious legend, however religious himself, often succeeds in his task only by filtering out of the legend all that gives it religious significance. How much this is true of Sholem Asch’s latest novel, Moses, is the subject of this COMMENTARY by Leslie A. Fiedler.
_____________
On the face of it, the Moses of Sholem Asch seems to fit easily into the category of that hybrid which is the current historical-religious novel. The traditional features of the historical novel (loose linear form, sentimentality toward the past, exotic sexiness, broad comic relief) are offered us in a style supposed to be suitable for the popular rendering of Holy Scripture (faintly archaic, stuffily reverential, devoid of irony). In short, we seem to be in the presence of the transposition of a great religious legend, still regarded by a large group in our society as literally true, into the favorite sub-literary form of that group. Yet in this case first appearances are a bit deceptive.
As the historical novel has grown more popular, it has grown more frankly meretricious. The days when Quo Vadis could win for its author a Nobel Prize are remembered with embarrassment; and to write in the style of Quo Vadis now, with any ambition beyond the modest one of making a living, seems unforgivable. But this is precisely the attempt of Sholem Asch in Moses and the whole series of which it is a climax; and it may be taken as tribute to the power of the Biblical story over a writer who has some real relation to it that Asch manages to survive purely literary objections.
The worth of a whole genre is at stake in an examination of Moses, whose strengths must therefore be pinned down carefully (the weaknesses are easier to expose). It is tempting to call its virtues cinematic, since they are most triumphantly exploited in the movies of D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille: a vivid, unabashed vulgarity in projecting moral conflicts as melodrama; a vision of history in terms of pageantry and mob scenes; and a naive post-Puritan piety at home in an ambience of sexuality. Everything is there: the extras, the make-up a shade realer than reality, the colossal sets, the sheen of splendid flesh (villainous, of course, and doomed), the sound, the technicolor.
As the master of such a form, Asch is undoubtedly the most popular Jewish writer in America; and who can doubt that among the hundreds of thousands who have read The Nazarene, The Apostle, and Mary there have been some who have responded with a shudder of real reverence, a genuine illumination, as the ancient stories assert their in eradicable appeal. Through a haze of bogus solemnity, via a trivial and hence acceptable form, some archetypal resonance has been bootlegged into the unconscious. The Torah must speak in the language of men, the rabbis asserted, and—though we are tempted to cry out in protest—even in the fallen language of our mass culture.
_____________
Asch has turned to a central legend of Jewishness (perhaps as a peace offering to his own community which has grown increasingly hostile over his “Christianizing”), to the account of the Exodus—the passage from slavery to freedom. That he has, following the pattern of his Christian books, chosen to do so in terms of a hero-story, an account of an individual forging the conscience of his race, is, I think, doubly unfortunate.
First, Moses is a singularly intractable figure for a popular storyteller pledged to “humanize” his protagonist. The glimmerings of individual personality that persist in the bare and stylized Biblical account of Moses are bafflingly contradictory: the gentle, inexplicably guilt-ridden stutterer and the Michel-angelesque titan at home with God and the lightnings. In Asch’s book, there is a constant danger of the protagonist splitting in two, leaving finally a modern Israeli major-general and a liberal-minded member of a modern congregation regarding each other in confusion over the fragments of the archetype.
And second, Moses as a “character” should not be permitted to blur the story of the timeless encounter between God and all of Israel which is called “coming up out of Egypt.” Moses is no irreplaceable redeemer in the Christian sense. There is a traditional Jewish saying that if Moses had not brought us forth another would have done quite as well; and in the Haggadah, a communally composed ritualized retelling of the tale for Passover, Moses has quite disappeared. There is something more than a little upsetting, falsely modern, in Mr. Asch’s “advanced” Moses, a kind of progressive rabbi wheedling and whipping a barbaric horde into liberty.
But more significant than the particular weaknesses of the individual story are certain indications in Moses of difficulties raised by the whole popular tradition of handling religious legend or “myth.” The most important writers of our time, authors generally regarded with some suspicion by the average reader of Asch, are also often concerned with mythic material; but their strategies of approach are quite different. The serious writer, using what I will call the “poetic” approach, examines the great treasures of legend upon which religions—ancient and modern—have depended, with certain new techniques of interpretation provided by recent anthropology and psychology (Thomas Mann’s Joseph stories are good examples). Such writers read a myth as a communal imagining, through whose symbolic halfdisclosures can be discovered a dateless history of man, a record of events not given once and for all, but eternally repeated in the inner life of every individual. The serious writer searches for abiding significances behind parochial images; and he uses contemporary techniques not to “modernize” the myths of mankind, but to redeem their timelessness and their universality.
An essential aspect of the poetic approach is irony, and it is this even more than its anti-historicity that distinguishes it from the popular approach. The double attitude which at once believes and doubts, accepts and protests, deprecates and glorifies, is at the root of all truly modern styles. The simple poetry of a primitive folk to whom the marvelous is a matter of fact is lost to us forever; and the popular attempt to simulate it leads to a kind of fake-simple glum solemnity typified by run-of-the-mill church organ music and the prose styles of such writers as Lloyd Douglas and—Sholem Asch. The kind of believer to whom the popular styles pander thinks he can believe only what is made rational, but the serious writer knows that the very essence of genuine myth is madness, high humor, absurdity. The going down into Egypt and the coming up, the splitting of the waters and the promise on the mountain are important precisely because they are of a different order from the Battle of Gettysburg, and because they can only be accepted by transcending the realities which determine that two and two make four.
_____________
In its taste for absurdity and its quest for timelessness, the contemporary poetic approach is closer to the older naive folk treatment than is the popular, historical, quasirationalist approach. It is when Mr. Asch borrows from midrash and haggadah that he most nearly becomes a serious modern writer. The traditional Jewish sources have ceaselessly reworked the Moses story (it was, after all, never for the folk a story canonically established at a certain point, but one dreamed forever—its eternal truth inhering not in some specific moment in the past but in an endlessly receding future) and they supply to Asch the concept of Amalek as an enemy born and reborn to the end of time, as well as the notion of all souls, past and present, having stood (and still standing!) at the foot of Sinai to cry out their acceptance of the Law. This is indeed living water from dry rock, a revelation of what is most difficult for us to know; that which is all the time happening. That this is no secret from Mr. Asch is revealed in his epigraph: “The event is the seed sown in the fields of time. The seed decays and is lost. That which blossoms forth is truth; for, as it is written: Truth shall spring out of the earth.” Which quotation is in itself, by the way, an example of how to interpret a text.
But Mr. Asch does not remain true to the insight of these words, submitting instead to the “popular” demand that would make parochial history out of timeless legend. The popular mind does not know any longer what the folk mind knew instinctively and the sophisticated poetic mind has rediscovered; that it needs the resistance of the marvelous. It insists, in its folly, on a clear distinction between “legend” and “history,” “apocrypha” and “Scripture,” “mythology” and “the Bible,” condescending to the former as child’s play and gulping down the latter as fact. Mr. Asch yields to this distinction, labeling certain parts of his account “later legend has added. . .” or “the love of Israel has persuaded itself that. . . .” It is interesting that he does not so scrupulously tag his own emendations and inserted entertainments: the slapstick comedy of the Balaam episodes or the spicy-stories byplay under “the honey-smeared navel of Ashtoreth.”
The main body of the myth is turned in to “history,” carefully dated and localized, and buttressed with patiently worked up documentation: the Scripture’s shadowy “the Pharaoh” is given a dynastic name; the obviously mistaken reference to crossing the “Red Sea” is quietly but firmly emended to crossing the “Sea of Reeds,” etc. The map on the flyleaf gives away the whole game; here is no ancient chart with fabled monsters in the shadows of the hills and lusty winds with swollen cheeks in the comers, but a product of up-to-date science with the topography accurately indicated and a scale of miles. Who can doubt that the march traced on such a map “really” took place!
But Mr. Asch, since he has chosen to play the game of history, must take the consequences. He is aware, for instance, of the disconcerting fact that contemporary Egyptian records make no mention of the enslavement of the Jews, much less of their escape; and he returns to the problem compulsively again and again, interrupting his story to assure us that the number of Jews involved was so small the Egyptians didn’t even trouble to write them down on the slave lists, etc., etc. But who asked him? Similarly, he feels driven to refer to the astonishing resemblance between the story of Moses in the bulrushes and certain myths of the infancy of the god Horus, as if by assuring us that he is aware of these matters he thereby assures us that they are of no importance. And finally, having placed his Moses in time, Mr. Asch is plagued with the prime problem of “influence.” Did not Moses borrow his concept of God from the Aton-religion of the monotheistic Amen-Hotep? And once more the pageant halts and the action is suspended, while Aton is rather unconvincingly slandered.
_____________
It is not only the historicity of his tale that Mr. Asch feels obliged to defend, but also its rationality. He is forever cleaning up, toning down, and explaining away for the benefit of a postulated ideal reader who distrusts the marvelous: a liberal, genteel, rationalistic, anti-clerical Jew, especially tender over certain Christian objections to the Mosaic concept of Justice as superior to Love (though presumably less sensitive to vulgarity in prose style and treatment). There are four main stumbling blocks for such a reader: the miracles; the brutality and general un-gentlemanliness of the Jews; their respect for certain obviously irrational taboos; their excessive concern with ritual and sacrifice.
Toward the miracles, Mr. Asch has several attitudes: some he swallows quickly and passes on (the burning bush); some he explains away totally in naturalistic terms (the pillar of flame and the cloud of smoke); but chiefly he leans on what might be called The Theory of the Modified Order of Nature. Manna and the plagues are merely special extensions of certain quite ordinary phenomena; they call for no suspension of the “laws of nature,” merely a (forgivable under the circumstances) speeding up of events. The God of Asch, being as rational as any of us, would not absurdly disrupt his own commonsensical order; he simply works overtime on certain critical occasions.
That the ancient Hebrews really believed in “an eye for an eye” and vengeance “even unto the third and fourth generation” for man and God alike, Asch is not prepared to admit. These principles, abhorrent to all men of good will, may be written down in the text, but they have only a limited and specific reference, Asch insists, and are canceled out by more congenial references to loving one’s neighbor and individual responsibility. The cry of communal guilt and total vengeance is almost expurgated from Asch’s revised version; and the irrational bloody horror of the Bible’s deepest strata is rationalized away: the first archaic “ten commandments” is not even mentioned, and the terrifying cryptic fragment about the circumcision of the sons of Moses disappears. The actual deeds that remain imbedded in the story (the obliteration of cities, the looting of the Egyptians) are editorialized into reasonable facsimiles of the “decent thing” by talk of ultimatums and provocation and of retroactive agreements for the collection of back pay. In the atmosphere of the White Paper and the Labor Relations Board the sense of ancient terror is lost.
As for laws about not seething calves in their mothers’ milk, or not eating the flesh of beasts that do not split the hoof and chew the cud, or of avoiding—as untouchably filthy—menstruating women, these are either rationalized or sentimentalized into safeguards against idolatry, wise hygienic regulations, and respect for the rights of women!
The elaborate rules concerning sacrifice, ritual duties, and the privileges of the priest hood especially irk Mr. Asch, who considers them the joint product of selfish scheming on the part of the priests and concessions wrung from an unwilling Moses by a superstitious semi-barbaric horde. Indeed, for the sake of the melodrama which his genre demands, Mr. Asch is willing to make of Aaron an arch-villain, the ideal opponent of his righteous Moses; he comes within a hairsbreadth of remaking the story in the image of the New Testament’s black and white struggle between the High Priest and the Nazarene. Moses, conceived of by Mr. Asch as a blood-brother to the most emancipated Jews or Unitarians, thinks of religion as formless and individualistic, an act of unhoused and unritualized communion between the single man and Spirit.
The notion, so strong in the actual Torah, of the need for a communal form of worship, based on taboo, ritual, and myth, and guarded by a hierarchy armed with the power of death against its disrupters; the concept of religion itself as having no existence outside its traditional symbolic forms, is uncongenial to Mr. Asch’s protestant liberalism, and he generously acquits Moses of having subscribed to such beliefs. Even if one takes Moses and Aaron as symbolic representations of Priest and Prophet, their relationship in Israel has not been that of an irreconcilable clash between selfish superstition and disinterested truth as in Mr. Asch’s post-enlightenment reading, but of a healthy dialectical interplay between conservatism and liberalism, tradition and insight. The incandescence of the priestly mind at its best, its balance and gentle piety, inform precisely the closing words of Deuteronomy which Mr. Asch is pleased to have a presumably anti-priestly Moses speak as the climax of his thought.
_____________
And yet—despite the shortcomings of Mr. Asch’s book as pseudo-history or apologetics, it has an impressive sweep when it is content to project the movement, the sound, the living feel of harried masses pressing on through the darkness, or stuttering to a halt in the desert blaze. The pulpit posturing of the prose no longer disturbs us; it is as if we were sitting once more in the familiar blackness of the movie house, watching on the screen the technicolored dreaming of all of us.
And there are achievements beyond these; for when Mr. Asch puts aside his concern with dates and documentation, when he turns to the traditional Jewish method of textual exegesis which it was once fashionable to call fantastic quibbling, he moves to a deeper level of symbol and significance. In his command to Moses at the edge of the “Sea of Reeds,” God had said first, “Tell the Bnai Israel to go forward!” and only then, “Lift up thy staff. . . .” And from this order of words, Mr. Asch tells us, Moses was able to deduce that the descent into the watery depths must precede the miracle. First the people must enter the sea, then the waters would be parted. In this version, the Biblical account is restored to its true archetypal form; at the start of the night journey, a symbolic drowning, a real immersion and rebirth, rather than the dry-shod passage of the account unpoetically read. Perhaps, after all, there is more magic and truth in pilpul than in objective history; and this, at least, is worth remembering.
_____________
