“This Nothing of a Voice”: Kafka’s Josefine Narrative as a Modern Reflection on Revelation and Language

Naharaim ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Greiner
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Zero Point ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Primal Scene ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Religious Aspects ◽  
Leading Question ◽  
The Voice

Abstract In reference to the paradoxical classification of art in Kafka’s Josefine story, religious aspects of the artist’s performances and their effect on the audience are scrutinized. The leading question is to what extent it evokes an allusion to the primal scene of divine revelation, following Stéphane Mosès’ commentary in his readings of the Bible. Josefine’s singing with a “nothing of a voice”, reduced to “the slightest of nullities”, the zero-point of signification, nevertheless affects an experience of presence and community that touches the listeners’ entire being. From the perspective of the artist, her song recitals are manifestations of supreme art of which she claims a soteriological significance in respect of her audience who belongs in Kafka’s portrayal obviously to the Jewish people. Around such a tension between maximal restraint of an utterance (the voice onset of the aleph of the word anokhi/I) and all-encompassing meaning (the name of God and all Commandments whose acceptance is constitutive for the Jewish people) circle the theological exegeses of the Sinai-scene (esp. Ex. 20,1) in the tradition of Rashi and Maimonides, in modernity e.g. of Gershom Scholem in dispute with Walter Benjamin on Kafka. It will be shown that the depicted paradoxes of Josefine’s art performances unfold the mentioned tension as an original literary reflection on revelation and language under the conditions of modernity.

“This Nothing of a Voice”: Kafka’s Josefine Narrative as a Modern Reflection on Revelation and Language

Naharaim ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-88
Author(s):  
Bernhard Greiner
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Zero Point ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Primal Scene ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Religious Aspects ◽  
Leading Question ◽  
The Voice

Abstract In reference to the paradoxical classification of art in Kafka’s Josefine story, religious aspects of the artist’s performances and their effect on the audience are scrutinized. The leading question is to what extent it evokes an allusion to the primal scene of divine revelation, following Stéphane Mosès’ commentary in his readings of the Bible. Josefine’s singing with a “nothing of a voice”, reduced to “the slightest of nullities”, the zero-point of signification, nevertheless affects an experience of presence and community that touches the listeners’ entire being. From the perspective of the artist, her song recitals are manifestations of supreme art of which she claims a soteriological significance in respect of her audience who belongs in Kafka’s portrayal obviously to the Jewish people. Around such a tension between maximal restraint of an utterance (the voice onset of the aleph of the word anokhi/I) and all-encompassing meaning (the name of God and all Commandments whose acceptance is constitutive for the Jewish people) circle the theological exegeses of the Sinai-scene (esp. Ex. 20,1) in the tradition of Rashi and Maimonides, in modernity e.g. of Gershom Scholem in dispute with Walter Benjamin on Kafka. It will be shown that the depicted paradoxes of Josefine’s art performances unfold the mentioned tension as an original literary reflection on revelation and language under the conditions of modernity.

Possessing the Iconic Book

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 309-329
Author(s):  
Claudia V. Camp
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Ben Sira ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Woman Wisdom ◽  
Martin Marty

I propose that the notion of possession adds an important ideological nuance to the analyses of iconic books set forth by Martin Marty (1980) and, more recently, by James Watts (2006). Using the early second century BCE book of Sirach as a case study, I tease out some of the symbolic dynamics through which the Bible achieved iconic status in the first place, that is, the conditions in which significance was attached to its material, finite shape. For Ben Sira, this symbolism was deeply tied to his honor-shame ethos in which women posed a threat to the honor of his eternal name, a threat resolved through his possession of Torah figured as the Woman Wisdom. What my analysis suggests is that the conflicted perceptions of gender in Ben Sira’s text is fundamental to his appropriation of, and attempt to produce, authoritative religious literature, and thus essential for understanding his relationship to this emerging canon. Torah, conceived as female, was the core of this canon, but Ben Sira adds his own literary production to this female “body” (or feminized corpus, if you will), becoming the voice of both through the experience of perfect possession.

Divine Words, Female Voices

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerusha Tanner Lamptey
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Feminist Theology ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Women Scholars ◽  
Female Voices ◽  
Divine Words ◽  
Vital Resource

Interreligious feminist engagement is a legitimate and vital resource for Muslim women scholars seeking to articulate egalitarian interpretations of Islamic traditions and practices. Acknowledging very real challenges within interreligious feminist engagement, Divine Words, Female Voices: Muslima Explorations in Comparative Feminist Theology uses the method of comparative feminist theology to skillfully navigate these challenges, avoid impositions of absolute similarity, and propose new, constructive insights in Muslima theology. Divine Words, Female Voices reorients the comparative theological conversation around the two “Divine Words,” around the Qur’an and Jesus Christ, rather than Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ, or the Qur’an and the Bible. Building on this analogical foundation, it engages diverse Muslim and Christian feminist, womanist, and mujerista voices on a variety of central theological themes. Divine Words, Female Voices explores intersections, discontinuities, and resultant insights that arise in relation to divine revelation; textual hermeneutics of the hadith and Bible; Prophet Muhammad and Mary as feminist exemplars; theological anthropology and freedom; and ritual prayer, tradition, and change.

The Bible and Israeli Identity

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Shapira
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Holy Trinity ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status ◽  
National Life ◽  
National Romanticism ◽  
Land Of Israel

ldquo;In our two thousand years of exile, we have not totally lost our creativity, but the sheen of the Bible dulled in exile, as did the sheen of the Jewish people. Only with the renewal of the homeland and Hebrew independence have we been able to reassess the Bible in its true, full light,” Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1953. This statement illustrates several core attitudes of the Jewish national renaissance movement towards the Bible. Ben-Gurion depicted a direct relationship between the state of the Jewish people and the status of the Bible: The two rose and fell together. His words are reminiscent of philosopher Martin Buber, Revisionist leader Zeءev Jabotinsky, and others, all of whom postulated a symbiotic relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel: “Just as the Jewish people need the land to live a full life, so the land needs the Jewish people to be complete” wrote Buber. The Bible, according to Ben-Gurion, was the third component of the Jewish “holy trinity” of people, land, and book. It served as testimony of Jewish national life in the land of Israel in former times, as a blueprint for reestablishing this way of life, as proof of a glorious past and promise for the future. It nurtured a national romanticism and both inspired and buttressed universal ideas; it was the bedrock of myth and epos, of earthliness and valor, and also of a system of ethics and faith that rein in and restrain muscle and brawn. It was paradoxical proof of both Jewish uniqueness and Jewish similitude, “like all the nations” (I Samuel 8:5); “materialism” and “spirituality”; historical continuity and historical severance between the people and the land.

Saint Thomas and His Sources

2021 ◽  
pp. xxi-20
Author(s):  
Jean-Pierre Torrell
Keyword(s):  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Bible ◽  
High Regard ◽  
The Church

St Thomas’s sources are to be found in the ‘authorities’ he quotes; he uses them according to precise criteria that make it possible to put them in a hierarchy. First, citations from the Bible have an authority that is absolute in principle. The argument from authority is the weakest of all in human reason, but it is the most efficacious if it is based on divine revelation. Second, the authority of the Fathers of the Church is great in the realm of faith, but not in other matters; they are susceptible to an expositio reverentialis. Third, when they speak the truth, the authorities of human reason represented by the philosophers likewise carry weight, since reason is not in itself contrary to faith. Since grace does not destroy nature, it is legitimate to have recourse to the philosophers. Thomas holds them in high regard, and the manner in which he behaves in respect to them remains exemplary for us all, whether we be philosophers or theologians.

Composition as Critique

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moulie Vidas
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Babylonian Talmud

This chapter examines a thematic series of sugyot that concern the genealogical division of the Jewish people, arguing that the Babylonian Talmud trains its audience to view the production of genealogical knowledge, and the traditions in which it is transmitted, as manipulated and personally motivated. The chapter offers a critique of this genealogical knowledge, which encompasses statements, rulings, bits of information that the rabbis transmitted in the matter of Jewish genealogy, in particular, the classification of certain persons, families, or regions as genealogically “unfit” or “impure” for the purpose of marriage. Two principal sections of the Bavli's discussion of m. Qidd., each illustrating a different aspect of Talmudic composition, are analyzed. The first is a conversational sugya, which focuses on the purification of Israel. The second segment has at its center a long story about Rav Yehuda, and it concludes with a list of genealogical traditions.

Fr. Tadeusz Sroka. Dziennik izraelski czyli religijny wymiar ludzkiego losu (An Israeli diary, or the religious dimension of man's fate). Warsaw: Spokania. 1985.

2004 ◽  
pp. 411-415
Author(s):  
Stanisław Krajewski
Keyword(s):  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World

This chapter looks at Fr. Tadeusz Sroka's An Israeli Diary, or the Religious Dimension of Man's Fate (1985). An Israeli Diary takes the form of excerpts from a diary written in the years 1970–71. Each entry opens with press news about political events in the Middle East, followed by pondering over the Bible or the fate of the Jewish people. There are hardly any data concerning contemporary Israel, except a few facts showing Arab intransigence and the hopeless situation of Israel ‘in human terms’. The author says very little about Jewish history and nothing about Judaism; the Talmud is not mentioned, even in places where it could have been useful, for example in reflecting on capital punishment. The author's perspective is metaphysical; he assumes that the election of Israel is eternal. This, incidentally, is the official standpoint of the Catholic Church today, confirmed more than once by John Paul II. As a result, Israel is seen as the centre of the world. Next, the fate of the Jews reveals the ultimate perspectives of the human condition: on one pole the Holocaust, on the other the re-creation of the state by visionaries, in defiance of reason. Israel is a sign for the world, and today's secular Israel is an appropriate sign for the contemporary materialistic world.

Erasmus, Desiderius (c.1466–1536)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Rummel
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Christian Humanism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
Absolute Knowledge ◽  
The Church ◽  
Textual Critic

Although Erasmus was not a systematic philosopher, he gave a philosophical cast to many of his writings. He believed in the human capacity for self-improvement through education and in the relative preponderance of nurture over nature. Ideally, education promoted docta pietas, a combination of piety and learning. Erasmus’ political thought is dominated by his vision of universal peace and the notions of consensus and consent, which he sees as the basis of the state. At the same time he upholds the ideal of the patriarchal prince, a godlike figure to his people, but accountable to God in turn. Erasmus’ epistemology is characterized by scepticism. He advocates collating arguments on both sides of a question but suspending judgment. His scepticism does not extend to articles of faith, however. He believes in absolute knowledge through revelation and reserves calculations of probability for cases that are not settled by the authority of Scripture or the doctrinal pronouncements of the Church, the conduit of divine revelation. Erasmus’ pioneering efforts as a textual critic of the Bible and his call for a reformation of the Church in its head and members brought him into conflict with conservative Catholic theologians. His support for the Reformation movement was equivocal, however. He refused to endorse the radical methods of the reformers and engaged in a polemic with Luther over the question of free will. On the whole, Erasmus was more interested in the moral and spiritual than in the doctrinal aspects of the Reformation. He promoted inner piety over the observance of rites, and disparaged scholastic speculations in favour of the philosophia Christi taught in the gospel. The term ‘Christian humanism’ best describes Erasmus’ philosophy, which successfully combined Christian thought with the classical tradition revived by Renaissance humanists.

The Two Kinds of Depression According to St. Paul

1967 ◽  
Vol 113 (500) ◽  
pp. 779-780 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark D. Altschule
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
Current Classification ◽  
English Translations ◽  
The One ◽  
Similar Classification

One current classification of depression divides the syndrome into psychotic and non-psychotic varieties. It is interesting that a similar classification developed over a thousand years ago out of some words of St. Paul. In his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Ch. 7, v. 10, Paul wrote: “For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world worketh death.” The word sorrow used in English translations of the Bible stood for the tristitia of Latin versions (Greek λνπη); connoting sadness, sorrow, despondency, depression. Paul's distinction between the two kinds of tristitia, the one “from God” and the other “of the world”, led mediaeval theologians to enlarge on differences between the two kinds of depression.

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