Benjamin's Feast of Booths

Abstract

In exile and fleeing Nazis, carrying his most recent work on his back, Walter Benjamin attempted to crawl over Pyrenees, like a snail, completing his life's work in August, 1940 when he died anonymously in a hotel room in Port Bou, Spain. As Benjamin noted in crystallizations of Passagen-Werk, original form of all dwelling is existence not in house but in shell. The bears impression of its occupant. In most extreme instance, dwelling becomes a shell (14,4).1 What is memorable for us about this singular passage is not merely that Benjamin tragically passed away in exile, but that he served as an unheeded prophetic sign for eventual loss of millions of Jewish lives, each an exile in one way or another. While Benjamin commented that Jugendstil unsettled [nineteenth century] world of in a radical way, we can say that genocidal policies of fascist National Socialism unsettled shell-building world of not only Benjamin, but shell-building worlds of many, unfortunately anonymous, others. Citing his text again: Today this world has disappeared entirely, and dwelling has diminished: for living, through hotel rooms; for dead, through crematoriums (I4,4). Hotel rooms and crematoriums-what apparently unlikely correspondences: desiderata of modern cosmopolitan industry and fascist utilization of technology brought together in that Benjamin built. From Rosenzweig In The Star of Redemption, published in 1921, Franz Rosenzweig would say that people is not allowed to linger in sheltering shade of Sinai, in which God it so that it might be with him. It must leave hidden togetherness with god and issue forth into world. It must start upon its wanderings through wilderness, wanderings whose end generation that stood under shall not live to see. It will be a later-born generation that will find rest in divine sanctuary of home, when wanderings through wilderness are over...This serves to remind people that no matter how solid house of today may seem, no matter how temptingly it beckons to rest and unimperiled living, it is but a tent which permits only a pause in long wanderings through wilderness of centuries.2 Being alone in sheltering shade of Sinai is equivalent to what Benjamin would say, in late 1920s, as being sheathed in receptacle of an interior, as age-old, as eternal, as the image of that abode of human being in maternal womb (I4,4). While Benjamin most likely did not have The Star of Redemption open in front of him as he gathered together citations to assemble Passagen-Werk, it was nonetheless nearby, and I would argue that a careful reader of both texts can discern traces of Rosenzweig's work in Benjamin's, since he had been studying The Star since at least 1921 but never felt schooled enough in Rosenzweig's thought to do more than occasionally draw from that text.3 Reading between citations and lines in Chapter I-The Interior, The Trace of Passagen-Werk, however, it seems that Benjamin was indeed inspired by some of ideas of exile and redemption that so strongly characterize Rosenzweig's work. Like Benjamin, Rosenzweig marks fusion of theory and praxis throughout his work, a characteristic Rosenzweig notes at one point as occurrence of simultaneity of sinnlich and ubersinnlich, sensual and trans-sensual in phenomenon of experience of poetic love.4 In dealing with Jewish specificity, Rosenzweig depicts Jewish social life as based upon anticipatory functions of Jewish ritual life-their habits and social gestures that are practiced to provide hope, to confront radical skepticism, and to structure an ethically meaningful community life-practices, however, that are critically separated from political machinations of nation-state; but, because of nature of separation, remain in close contact with work of such governing entities. …