![]() He prefers the disengaged role of what Scholem calls a “historiographer,” someone who announces an impending doom as a straightforward, inevitable fact. He would rather not have to bear the responsibility of a self-canceling utterance. He runs from a task that seems self-defeating. Jonah knows that the prophetic calling, if it is successful, must overturn the prediction it declares. Jonah is told to inform the citizens of Nineveh about God’s impending punishment for their inequities. The story told in the Book of Jonah describes a man fleeing his prophetic calling. In it, Scholem interprets the Book of Jonah as a lesson about how prophecy announces and enacts the deferral of divine judgment. Scholem’s 1919 essay “On Jonah and the Concept of Justice” is his earliest exploration of the theme of apocalypse deferred. ![]() ![]() ![]() In fact, one might say that all their intellectual and creative efforts were directed at diagnosing this Faustian temptation, exposing its sources, and offering some guidance to those who prefer to live in the time opened up by the deferral of the apocalypse. Neither Scholem nor Dick ever succumbed to the Faustian temptation to hasten the apocalypse, to leap headlong into the abyss of destruction. ![]() Dick? Despite whatever may have divided them, they each shared one goal: to investigate-with all the rigor and honesty they could muster-the historical experience of time lived under the shadow of the apocalypse. Copyright © by Anne Dick, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |