black fire on white fire: Mom brings the Torah into it (& I bring Olivier)

I know, I know: I owe the world a big post about the Hackney Empire, and it will happen! Soon! It’s been a strange weekend of slobbing around, really. I watched the whole ten hours of Brideshead Revisited, for example. I’ll tell you now for nothing that I wept at the end, and that Laurence Olivier redeems the whole thing with a completely majestic (& slightly hammy) performance in the last episode. I revere him. I also spent ages wandering up and down Church St yesterday, and took some pictures in the old churchyard that I wanted to blog. But before all that, this. It just arrived from Mama Baroque, who clearly needs to go watch Brideshead Revisited. I’ll give you her entire email in its entirety:

Well, I read this and immediately had to send it. You probably know there’s a very old Midrash that says that Torah is written in “black fire on white fire.” I’m using that in the book and was browsing around interpretations this morning when this popped up: (http://www.avakesh.com/2007/10/black-fire-on-w.html) Obviously it’s for you!

Moshe Idel collected some of statements from the early Kabbalists in an excellent discussion of this saying in his Absorbing Reflections, an erudite, overlong and tedious work on interpretation methods in Kabbola (ch.1). Of particular interest is the following quote from R. Yosef Ergas, the noted contemporary of Ramchal.

“On the parchment… there is a likeness of an image…because under the YOD of ink there is one white YOD of the parchment which sustains the Yod of ink….if the letters will fly and disappear from (the parchment). it will remain white without any likeness at all”.

What I think he is saying is that once you put a letter down on paper, you define the space under it, so that even if the letter is erased, that white under-letter remains, visible or not. Thus also, the letters of the Torah brought into being white fire, the space upon which they were imposed, and which was also eternal and pre-existent by the virtue of its suitability for the black fire that will eventually crown it.

Now to my suggestion.

What I might propose is that Torah employs a way of presenting information that relies heavily on omissions, in a way that makes what is not said communicate in tandem with what is said. Eric Auerbach in the first chapter of Mimesis pointed out that gaps, shadows, lack of description and reliance on the reader supplying the background is an integral feature of Biblical writing. It is these features that make Biblical writing so unique and powerful. Perhaps then, this implied background is the white fire that outlines and complements the black fire of what Torah actually writes.

Here is a quote that expresses the concept beautifully, writing about poetry.

“Another way of saying the same thing is to suggest that that the white space between stanzas means something. If nothing is conceived to be taking place within it, if no kind of silent pressure or advance or reconsideration or illumination or perception seems to be going on in that white space, the reader has a legitimate question to ask,” why is that white space there, and what am I supposed to do with it ” (P. Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, MCGraw-Hill, 1979, p.155)

Actually, I think my mother really should go watch Brideshead. If she can cope with it. It’s about exactly what she says here: the nature of what we say and what truth is, and how it is visibly (or cognitively) represented, and the importance of what went before, and what the nature of our brief tenure here is, and all the rest of it. Also, in its unflinching examination of the gulf between religion (and tradition) and secularism (and modernity) it really does have a rather remarkable relevance (there’s that word for you) in our current troubled blah-di-blah. In other words, it feels important, in a way that goes waaaay beyond Thatcherism and yuppies and teddy bears and fluffy hair. (Or maybe she could just reread the book. There are some cracking performances but all the best bits really do come form Waugh.)