Reviewed by: The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature by Neta Stahl Chen Mandel-Edrei Neta Stahl. The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature. London: Routledge, 2020. 212 pp. Neta Stahl's The Divine in Modern Hebrew Literature provides us with fresh terminology with which to consider modern Hebrew literary historiographies and constitutes a call for new scholarly frameworks within the field of modern Hebrew literature. Stahl argues that despite challenges to the established critical narrative of secularization in modern Hebrew letters, the binary categories of religion and secularization still dominate. Stahl claims that this binary system is ineffective for reading the various and complex forms by which divinity appears in modern texts and seeks to go beyond and against this limited framework. As was illuminated by Gershom Scholem, Hannan Hever, Shachar Pinsker, and others, the divine is embedded in the Hebrew language despite attempts to repress or secularize it, a condition that in the Zionist context might be culturally destructive. Acknowledging this, Stahl works to illuminate a broader spectrum [End Page 447] of representations of the divine while extending our understanding of their literary and cultural functions. Fundamental to this literature, Stahl writes, are three religious-philosophical tensions that challenge the act of representing divinity. The first is the biblical prohibition against representing God, which, developed by Maimonides, allows a merely rhetorical representation of a transcendent and bodyless entity whose intentions are concealed. The second is kabbalist perceptions according to which divinity resides in language itself, posing representational problems. The third is a historical tension that questions the assumption that modern Hebrew writers worked to depart from tradition. Here, Stahl adopts Shraga Bar-On's suggestion to understand modern literary projects through the concept of quest in which God is present and absent simultaneously. In the first chapter, which is dedicated to pantheism, Stahl reads canonic works from the turn of the twentieth century (by Aḥad Ha-ʿam, S. Y. Abramovitsh, Ḥ. N. Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and M. Y. Berdyczewski) and validates the well-established claim that these writers did not seek to secularize Judaism but to extract God from the limited halakhic world to a national sphere, which is natural and universal. The second chapter focuses on the relation between images of man and God as described by Y. H. Brenner and Avraham Shlonsky. Here, "theomorphism" and its nuances (mainly anthropomorphism) are the center of discussion. Stahl shows that in Brenner's writing, the world-without-God forces man to embrace godly powers for redeeming humanity, a move that fails and leaves man in what Aharon Appelfeld has called "distress of religiosity" (43). In Shlonsky's late poems, God provides utopian dimensions to the national labor of the pioneer, who then becomes "a divine creature whose own hands re-create God's world" (52). The third chapter is dedicated to Uri Ẓvi Greenberg and presents a complicated image of his transition from a world filled with "the God of mother-father" to a broken world (seemingly) devoid of God. Stahl shows how Greenberg's response to World War I was to split God into two entities; while rejecting the universal God of the arts that his contemporaries embraced, Greenberg elevates the local God whose divinity is realized through the open wound of the poet. Greenberg's response to World War II in Reḥovot ha-nahar (1951) is read by Stahl through the notion of hester panim and the dynamics of theodicy that help illuminate the poet's justification for violence. Focusing on S. Y. Agnon, the fourth chapter examines providence and punishment. Discussing various works, Stahl claims that Agnon depicts divine order through negative theology and criticizes it using what she calls "theo-narration" (103). The fifth chapter deals with Dahlia Ravikovitch and Yehuda Amichai's antiwar poetry. Stahl points out that in Amichai's poems, humans are presented as victims of violence that results from a distanced divinity; a structure that is incompatible with the secular world and that overlooks human accountability. She explains that this antitheodicy rhetoric allows Amichai to remain loyal to the victims by graphically depicting the results of violence without "tainting" them with politics. Juxtaposing Ravikovitch with Amichai, Stahl shows that Ravikovitch emphasizes what...
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