Nov

29

2024

In the fall, when we read in Breishit about days of yore and primeval deeds, I find myself burrowing into the ancient history of the left. What Breishit is to the Jew, Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940) is to the socialist. In an account of the patriarchs—Vico begat Michelet, Fourier and Owen begat Lasalle, Marx begat Lenin—Wilson follows lonely, eccentric individuals who nurture a utopian, countercultural belief system until it takes hold of a mass collective. Like Breishit, that is, To the Finland Station narrates the prehistory of a people, the slow smoldering of an ember-like idea until it explodes into a wildfire. Both are weirdly plangent epics, at once monumental and critical. Just as Breishit’s writers were both trumpeting the nation’s glorious founders and also explaining its failings etiologically, that is, in terms of its forebears’ faults, so too, Wilson was interested not in leftist hagiography but in understanding how the radical promise of the Bolshevik revolution had soured into Stalinism. Thus, while both books track how an idea enters into and transforms the world, they retain a certain nostalgia for these ideas before they acquired their publics—before, as Marx wrote of the transition from intellectual discourse to militant revolution, the weapon of criticism gave way to the criticism of weapons.

In the Bible, the pivot point occurs in this week’s parshah, Toldot, which tells the story of Isaac and Rebecca’s two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob is the younger, bookish brother—“a dweller of tents,” which the rabbis playfully imagine as mystical yeshivas where Jacob studied with his ancestors. At his mother Rebecca’s bidding, he tricks his blind father Isaac into giving him the blessing intended for his hirsute, virile brother Esau, the firstborn, “a skillful hunter, a man of the field.” Rebecca dresses Jacob in Esau’s clothes and covers his soft, hairless hands with kids’ skins; the ruse works, and Isaac pronounces the coveted blessing upon his younger son.

It is at this moment in our parshah that Isaac, who is initially skeptical but is convinced by the feeling and smell, utters a key line: “The voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau.” When I chant that line in the Torah, I invariably cry. In light of traditional rabbinic symbolism—in which Jacob stands for ethical, law-bound Israel and Esau for rapacious, imperial Rome—this seemingly concrete observation becomes a grandly tragic prophecy: The covenant passes to its rightful heir—the holy idea is realized, godliness dwells in the world—only by dressing itself in the robes of power, by acquiring the hands of the hunter. Isaac’s line reminds me of Wilson’s portrait of Lenin as personally virtuous, admirable, and without rancor, but as also consciously suppressing these qualities in favor of a cold, revolutionary calculus. In a famous passage, Lenin praises Beethoven’s Appassionata as “marvelous superhuman music,” but then says, “I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty . . . And now you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head . . . You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy, though our ideal is not to use force against anyone.” The music is Beethoven’s music, but the hands are the hands of the tsar.

Wilson’s Lenin and Jacob in Esau’s clothing are tense, even painful contradictions, from whom one almost naturally shrinks; by 1971, Wilson had renounced his complex image of Lenin, who he now understood as simply monstrous. Similarly, classical rabbinic readers were largely incapable of imagining Jacob (and thus themselves) with power, or perhaps of abiding the attendant contradiction between ends and means. Thus, many rabbis discard that painful yet, dissolving Isaac’s tense, contradictory attribution of both Esau’s and Jacob’s attributes to a single subject. The second-century sage Rabbi Yehuda ben Rabbi Illai, for instance, reportedly read the verse as, “The voice is the voice of Jacob, and the hands are the hands of Esau,” meaning, “Jacob’s voice cries aloud about what Esau’s hands did to him in Beitar,” alluding to the violent Roman suppression of anti-imperial Jewish revolts. Just as the rabbis struggled to imagine a Jewish community with power, we perhaps regard a left that must reckon with its own strength as an outlandish, far-off prospect. The rabbinic complaint captures a ready-to-hand intuition about history: that the rapacious violence of the imperial marauders will encounter no counterposing alternative—that Jacob’s voice cannot command, only lament. Yet neither To the Finland Station nor Breishit succumbs to such hopelessness. These are stories of world-historical transformation, of the capacity of ideas to inhabit collectivities and overthrow princes—of how, as Wilson proclaims when Lenin arrives in St. Petersburg, “for the first time in the human exploit the key of a philosophy of history was to fit an historical lock.”

Wilson would not have been thrilled, to put it mildly, to have his work compared to Breishit. To the Finland Station is, after all, resolutely anti-religious. Wilson not only begins his narrative with the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico, whom he praises for liberating history-writing from theological dogma, but goes on to attribute nearly every fault in the socialist movement to the atavistic pull of mystical, providential thinking. Indeed, a secularist animus binds together the somewhat disparate subjects of his book; it is the throughline that connects the anti-clerical French Revolutionaries to the atheistic Bolsheviks. Wilson thus has his own, inverted version of the binary between the worldly Esau—the practical, tactically savvy “man of the field”—and Jacob, the dogmatic dreamer who foolishly falls for a deterministic divine promise.

Here, though, Wilson has simply misunderstood his own book, which derives its dramatic power, its intoxicating blend of heroic grandeur and tragic pathos, precisely from the dialectic between abstract ideas and material circumstances, between the absolute promise of human freedom and the brutal, inhumane workings of history. To me, the lesson of the odd resonances between these biblical and socialist mytho-histories is that Jacob and Esau—whether that means morality and force, religion and the secular, or Breishit and To the Finland Station—are not neat dichotomies, however much we might like them to be. Perhaps Isaac has it right after all. Esau and Jacob are all mixed up; the real error is to think they can be clearly distinguished.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.