Mosaic

Mosaic is a confident and unpretentious little magazine put out by the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel Foundation, and its fall issue demonstrates once again that a good little magazine can survive Harvard's indifference. Partly, Mosaic succeeds because it is interesting to read, but, after all, other interesting little magazines have drowned where Mosaic swims. A more persuasive reason is that this publication has a clear idea of what it is about, a definite community for whom it writes, and a comfortable (perhaps too comfortable) sense that it possesses what most people at Harvard lack--a cultural heritage.

Its editing could be better. There are moments, for example, in Daniel Leifer's otherwise absorbing critique of Aaron David Gordon, when one chokes on dusty, academic prose. Prose aside, I think this piece is the best of the lot. Leifer rightly ranks Gordon with Buber and Rosenzweig as the most influential of this century's unorthodox European Jews, and he insists persuasively that Gordon is not so much the famed ideologue of Zionism's "religion of labor," as a theologian who fused strains of European romanticism into a new definition of Judaism. Certainly Gordon had a romantic sense of the limits of rationality, and a romantic belief in the necessity for personal experience as the source of religion. It is also easy to see that his anti-urban theorizing in the manner of Owen and Fourier, and his very German conception of nationality have contributed much to the more romantic and unfortunate aspects of modern Israel.

On this last point, Leifer and I disagree, as you might expect. Gordon's nationalism is no different from that German madness against which Buber warned the Jews in 1933. Universalist Christians (I use the adjective to weed Hegel out) have always maintained that the nation-state is a necessary evil, and that one's higher loyalties are to God and mankind. Leifer swallows Gordon's odd Germanic idea that the nation is the locus of man's creativity, that there are "no human ideals which are not national ideals." Gordon, it must be said, did tend to think of Israel as something mistily grander than a modern nation, but baleful romantic and biological fallacies so warp his nationalism that I am skeptical of its contemporary relevance. Leifer is not.

Much more relevant to this century is the antinomian facet of Gordon's thought, which Leifer rejects as being alien to the Jewish tradition. Maybe that's why I like it (some of my best friends work for Mosaic, don't forget.) The antinomian (existentialist is the current word, I suppose) bias of thinkers like Gordon and Buber clearly do clash with law-centered traditional Judaism. But the absence of an absolute ground for morality in these two writers is not, as Leifer says, evidence that Judaism today lacks vigor. Rather, it is a token that Gordon and Buber are groping for a truer, more relativistic truth than traditional Judaism ever admitted.

The other non-fiction in this Mosaic is a sort of modern midrash of Jacob, by Arthur Gold. One of the lovely things about this kind of playing with Biblical myths is that, after the game's over, the Bible still remains. In this case, Jacob emerges intact after Mr. Gold's wise use of him to represent the dual spirit of the Jews: "Jacob," the grasping, shrewd Jew folk-hero, and "Israel," the man who wrestles with God. I suppose Gold is right, but I always thought Jacob had more of the former in him--particularly the way his troubles in finding a wife snowball like a humorous, extravagant folktale. He hires out for a wife, works seven years only to get the wrong girl, and has to start all over again. And with each new wife he receives, there is a slave girl who also becomes involved in Jacob's rather generous instinct for fatherhood. You see what I mean.

Mosaic's fiction this time is pretty weak. "Adoshem," a short story by Leonard Tushnet, could have been very funny; part whimsy, part science fiction, it is the story of a Kabalist Rabbi in Brooklyn who, searching for God's name, plays around with the magic number e=mc squared until he is struck by lightning. It isn't funny, because Tushnet patronizes the old Rabbi he has created and has a sentimental realist's way of describing things in too much detail. Better written is Daniel Eigerman's "Cirrhosis to Benefit by Gala," another short story; this one has bits of excellent dialogue and snatches of humor, but its two main characters, a Jewish photographer and an alcoholic society woman seem awfully familiar: Mr. Eigerman is in danger of becoming a Jewish John O'Hara.

One of Martin Robbins' two poems, "Letter From a Place Near Siberia" struck me as an effective and scary weaving together of the phrases that terrify men in this century. Judith Kegan has two poems, both pleasant; the second's light, sophisticated banter is damaged by a lapse into treacle in the last two lines. And Neal Kozodoy has the Hebrew text and his own translations of some poems by Uri Zvi Greenberg, an Israeli poet. I can't read Hebrew, but parts of the translations makes me wish I could. Other parts are just puzzling.

Mosaic is fun to read, because it presents a cultural point of view. I suspect that Jews who come to Harvard are unlike members of other American minority cultures in that they often rediscover the value of their heritage here. I'm not talking now about a belief in God (an embarrassing topic at Harvard); I'm simply concerned with cultural identity. For other groups--like Catholics--Harvard is still an engine of mindless assimilation, cutting people off from their past.

A Jew at Harvard--theist or atheist--possesses cultural references in a community where most people have none. Witness Mosaic.