Non Fiction

Subverting the orthodox; an exploration of Cynthia Ozick's 'The Pagan Rabbi'

In the light of international attention given to Cynthia Ozick, in the 2005 Booker shortlist, it seems appropriate to explore the generally unfamiliar territory of her work. In this essay I will outline the complex of ideas and meanings underpinning her earliest published story, 'The Pagan Rabbi,' interpreting it in terms of Judaic ideologies and Ozick's subversion of patriarchal structures.

In this story a rabbi Kornfeld, is seduced by a female dryad, then commits suicide in a moment of ecstasy by hanging himself with his prayer shawl, or tallis, from the tree which her spirit inhabits. The narrator, a classmate from rabbinic seminary, visits the rabbi's learned widow and discovers how his former friend declined from Orthodox Judaism into Paganism. The story's title registers a dynamic split at the centre of Ozick's work, "Pan versus Moses," (1) Paganism versus Judaism or 'Greek Mind/Jewish Soul' as Strandberg (2) refers to this dialectic. There is a surprising paradox of juxtaposing 'rabbi' with 'pagan.' It is an unsettling conflict that evokes the austerities of halacha, Jewish law or as Wade calls it "the restless dissent of the disciplined life" (3) but also the energies of idolatrous/ anti-orthodox practices.

In 'Metaphor and Memory' Ozick alludes to Mathew Arnold's "fertile delta: Hebraism and Hellenism," (4) and argues that Greek culture was elitist because it rejected all non-Greeks as 'other', 'barbarian' or potential slave cultures to be exploited. Ozick contrasts this with Biblical compassion for 'the stranger', learnt through the Jewish experience of slavery in Egypt. This means that for Ozick, Judaism has an in-built, universalistic morality, which has been almost devoured by the more powerful, supposedly benign Greek-based frame of Christian-Western values. The result is that both sets of ethics are questioned through a dialectical process of mutual analysis.

In 'The Pagan Rabbi' Greek culture is represented by Philosophy that questions the nature of existence, but is here a system connected to Pagan belief in metamorphoses between the human and spirits of nature. Before bedtime R. Kornfeld told his daughters surreal stories about a "tree that turned into a girl." (5). The Judaic element represented is orthodox; its antithesis is atheism and acculturation into American society, rather than less austere versions of Jewish thought. The specific Orthodoxy reflected in the views of father figures within this story is that of the intellectually rigorous misnagid or rationalists rather than the mystical Hasidic tradition. The relevance of this is that the story would not make sense if the central characters were Hassidic because the Hasidim prayed out in the countryside, trying to achieve connection with the divine through Nature. Thus, if he were Hassidic, the Pagan Rabbi's behaviour would be un-radical and merely located within a different norm of orthodox belief. The story also depends on interpretations of the epigraph from Ethics of the Fathers placed at the opening.

Rabbi Jacob said: "He who is walking along and studying, but then breaks off to remark, 'How lovely is that tree!' or 'How beautiful is that fallow field!'- Scripture regards such a one as having hurt his own being." (6)

This Mishnaic statement expounds the primacy of cerebral Torah study over the lure of the senses, which again could be constructed as a dichotomy between Hellenistic worship of body as opposed to Judaism's concern with soul. Within post-Romantic Western thought it is assumed that souls are nurtured through contact with Nature, but this particular rabbinic tradition of 2000 years held that the main purpose of the soul was intellectual. If one is not involved in Torah discourse, then one suffers spiritual or communal death, cut off from tradition and peoplehood. All activity other than Torah discourse is considered, from this viewpoint, to be bitul zeman or wasting time.

The story could be interpreted as the eponymous rabbi dying because he wasted time looking at a tree, instead of studying Torah. It is notable that Kornfeld's fate is predicated on his father's rejection of Greek philosophy. The father states that philosophy leads to idolatry; Kornfeld takes up Hegel and, possibly as a consequence, worships and is later seduced and destroyed by a dryad. But this interpretation does not take into account the rejection of Torah values by the narrator. He is also dislocated from the Judaic world, but is not overtly punished for his loss of faith. This punitive interpretation assumes Ozick's tone is condemnatory of Kornfeld's rejection of his own family and belief system. There are, however, several levels of complexity in this story.

The tree on which Kornfeld hangs himself is symbolic of distraction from Torah study, but also resonant of the Edenic trees of knowledge and evil. It is symbolic of the crucifixion of a more famous rabbi who was seduced by inner voices away from traditional views to become identified with Greek/pagan fertility rites and thus be the key figure for blending Greek and Judaic worlds in one person, namely Jesus Christ himself. Greek fertility-cults were orgiastic and priapic in terms of symbolism and practice, but from the outlook of 2000 years of Jewish suffering at the hands of their Christian offspring, following fertility cults was not viewed so positively from the Jewish perspective.

Isaac Kornfeld's name may allude to the Biblical Isaac's outdoor meditations and "the fields" of the epigraph. Although his self-destruction might be a punishment, it could, however, be argued that he was fulfilling some important need in himself through communing with nature. Or does the Nature goddess provide an answer, which Torah study cannot? Is he attracted to something forbidden because of subconscious urges? There are also certain constituents that make his current life impossible. These include the claustrophobic expectations of his oppressive father, the disappointment of not getting male heirs and the haunting presence of Scheindel, his Holocaust-survivor wife.

Part of the meaning of the story is about the relations of fathers to sons, and the subversion of patriarchy. It is significant that the epigraph is from Ethics of The Fathers and that the Pagan Rabbi's name is Isaac, whilst the author of the epigraph is his Biblical son, Jacob. There is explicit rivalry between the narrator's father and Kornfeld's father as to their sons' respective achievements. Both are disappointed. The narrator leaves the talmudic seminary, marries out, has no offspring and works in a low-status job as a bookseller. Kornfeld initially achieves high status within the talmudic world, but has female progeny, succumbs to a female nature spirit and commits suicide, thereby wiping out the name of his male forebears. The patriarchal line has ended. There is only hope of Jewish continuity through the rabbi's widow and her daughters left to continue the tradition. The deracinated secular perspective of the narrator offers no obvious successor to the patriarchal legacy.

The implication is, as in Ozick's 'Envy or Yiddish in America' that the effect of millennia of anti-semitism, the Holocaust and the overwhelming nature of Christian/Hellenic pressures is the loss of faith in a Jewish future (7). In 'The Pagan Rabbi' the self-destruction is the internal contradiction between Kornfield's own culture and individuation into a crazy cult-like spirit world where disloyalty to the tribe finds its catharsis in a moment of epiphany and vision. Both stories question the meaning of Jewish intellectual traditions in a post-Holocaust survivor world.

There are two styles in 'The Pagan Rabbi.' The narrator's terse, ironic perspective, critical balance, Yiddish humour and self-mocking typified in the opening.

When I heard that Isaac Kornfeld, a man of piety and brains, had hanged himself in the public park, I put a token in the railway stile and journeyed out to see the tree.

We had been classmates in the rabbinical seminary. Our fathers were both rabbis. They were both friends, but only in a loose way of speaking: in actuality our fathers were enemies. They vied with one another in demonstrations of charitableness, in the capricious glitter of their scholarship, in the number of their adherents. Of the two, Isaac's father was the milder. I was afraid of my father; he had a certain disease of the larynx, and even if he uttered something so trivial as "Bring the tea" to my mother, it came out splintered, clamorous, and vindictive.

Neither man was philosophical in the slightest. It was the one thing they agreed on. "Philosophy is an abomination," Isaac's father used to say. "The Greeks were philosophers, but they remained children playing with their dolls. Even Socrates, a monotheist, nevertheless sent money down to the temple to pay for incense to their doll."

"Idolatry is the abomination," Isaac argued, not philosophy."

"The latter is the corridor to the former," his father said.

My own father claimed that if not for philosophy I would never have been brought to the atheism which finally led me to withdraw, in my second year, from the seminary.

It is as if "piety" is not compatible with "brains," religious naivety at odds with intelligence. Ozick's prose carries a welter of subtle ironies. Putting the "token in the railway stile" is a trivial gesture, undermining the drama of a momentous suicide. Nature is diminished to a public park, the great hope of intelligence reduced to a shock suicide. Instead of mourning or immediately visiting the bereaved, the narrator comically rushes off to see the tree where the tragedy happened. The qualities of the two fathers are compared succinctly, but bizarre differences distinguish them. The fathers' emotional side, enmity and jealousy are more significant than any ideological or outward similarities. The centre of their rivalry and agreement turns on a rejection of Greek philosophy and its worship of "dolls."

Within this frame of complex differentiation, analysis and humour there is a second style, serious, un-ironic, conveying self-discovery, as a vehicle to deliver the Pagan rabbi's diary voyage into the world of dryads and Lilliths. The suicide's confessional means there is an exploration of the female side, but also distance between narrator and the main character. We might not identify with the rabbi's quest partly because of the infantalised nature of the woman to whom he is attracted. His experience is made strangely alien because ciphered through the perspective of the narrator's cynicism and wife's distance from her husband's weird obsession. Yet these features are ways of offering a plausible frame through which we can view the rabbi's hubris, fall and tragedy.

Ozick breaks taboos as to what can be said from an orthodox perspective, expressing the imaginative tension between her own culture and its alternatives. However, it is assumed that the reader understands nuances of Jewish ideology. Ozick makes no apology for herself as a Jewish writer, which for her is a kind of cultural category, determining intellectual subject matter. She does not accept the Jewish writer as parochial, because Torah language has permeated all culture. In this story orthodox ideas are scrutinised in opposition to female energies that break the boundaries of a male-oriented society. Ozick's interest is located in the power and complexity of Jewish texts and myths and their inter-reactive impact on male and female consciousness.

Her genius is a sparse wit, shifts in mood and tone, commanding control of ironic language and a subversive analysis of modern and ancient cultures, juxtaposing rationalist orthodoxies and their opposites, ultimately to evoke the tragi-comic perplexities of individual lives.

  1..  Weiner. D  (1976) 'Cynthia Ozick, Pagan v Jew' SAJL, vol. 8 no. 2, p179.

  2.. Sandberg. V. (1994) GreekMind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

  3.. Wade. S. (1999) Jewish American Literature since 1945, Edinburgh University Press

  4.. Ozick. C. (1991)  Metaphor and Memory: Essays Vintage International, N.Y.  

  5.. Ozick. C. (1995 first pub 1961) The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, Syracuse Press.

  6.. Kara, J.H. (1945), quoted in The Authorised Daily Prayer Book The Soncino Press Dr J. H. Hertz, 2nd edition.

  7.. Ozick. C. (1995) 'Envy or Yiddish in America' Syracuse Press.

Mervyn Lebor