The Unsecularisable at the Heart of Secularisation — On Sacred Language, Spoken Language, a film by Nurith Aviv

Filmer la parole (Filming the Word) is a book devoted to Nurith Aviv’s cinematographic œuvre. It is made up of interviews with the filmmaker and of “Commentaries” written for the most part by the women and men of thought she has been inviting for decades to dialogue with her at the screenings of her films. A “Document” is inserted at the end of the work: Gershom Scholem’s letter to Franz Rosenzweig, À propos de notre langue. Une confession (Regarding Our Language. A Confession). Written in 1926, it was found again in 1985 in the historian’s archives, then translated, published, and commented on that same year by Stéphane Mosès. As Hélène Cixous writes, regarding the film Langue sacrée, langue parlée (Sacred Language, Spoken Language), this letter “Nurith knows it. She has accompanied it, but you do not see its apparent trace in the film; she does not cite it, but it is somewhere there, all the time.”¹

Scholem had committed himself very young to Zionism in Germany and had been struck in the same years by the “virus”² of a passion for the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. When he emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1923, Ben-Yehuda’s dream of “the Resurrection of Israel and of its language on the land of the Fathers”³ had begun to become reality, sustained by the relentless activism of this dreamer: the Zionist Congress of The Hague (1907) had adopted Hebrew as the official language of the movement; it was spoken in the streets, and the “actualisation” or “secularisation” of the sacred language was under way. Scholem’s tone in his letter to Rosenzweig is apocalyptic and prophetic. The “secularisation” (which he writes in quotation marks) is no more than a “ready-made expression,” an empty word that prevents speakers from realising the explosive force with which the words issuing from the sacred language are weighted. As if Ben-Yehuda’s dream could become a nightmare—not for Scholem’s “transitional generation,” but for the generations to follow. Scholem makes it clear at the end of his letter: the power contained in the words of the language is none other than the voice of God. This voice was going to return and make itself “heard again”⁴ in an anarchic manner. No longer being channelled by texts or by the fixed and repetitive forms of liturgy, nor by the fact that profane exchanges took place in another language, it would turn back vengefully against those who, by profaning the sacred language, had razed all the barriers of protection. At the time of this never-published letter, the future of the Zionist adventure was indeterminate, as was the form that this vengeful return would take. This letter “resurges,” Derrida writes, like a voice from beyond the grave in 1985⁵, “at a moment in the history of Israel that makes one more sensitive to this imminence of the apocalypse”⁶. The anguish before this imminence has never ceased; it has never been so palpable in our day since October 7, 2023. If, addressing Rosenzweig, Scholem confesses a disappointment, a “profound discouragement”⁷ regarding the way the accelerated concretisation of Zionism after the Balfour Declaration was being put into practice, one should not be mistaken: he was radically opposed to characterising it as a messianic movement. Thus, at the time when, shortly after the Six-Day War, people began to speak of the Gush Emunim in Israel, he declared that “each time one introduces messianism into politics, things go awry. It can only lead to catastrophe”⁸, and this last remark makes us irresistibly think of the far-right political messianism that has the wind in its sails today in Israel and elsewhere. What is, on the contrary, the background of his letter to Rosenzweig is his early interest in “the mystical theory of the essence of language”⁹, a central object of his exchanges with Walter Benjamin that would preoccupy him his entire life. It is against the background of such an interest that the active member of Brit Shalom¹⁰ could begin his letter thus: “there exists another danger, far more disturbing than the Arab nation and which is a necessary consequence of the Zionist enterprise: what about the ‘actualisation’ of the Hebrew language?”¹¹

The question of language at the heart of the Zionist secularisation of Judaism

In Les yeux de la langue (The Eyes of Language), Derrida insists on the strange linguistic device of this address by Scholem to Rosenzweig, which treats of Hebrew in German—a foreign “vehicular” language, but “nonetheless [the] maternal language of both correspondents.” It is indeed in German that the question of Verweltlichung (worldification, secularisation) is broached, degraded into “Säkularisierung,” a term of Latin origin which always carries a pejorative connotation in German philosophy. Derrida recalls that, in this context, secularisation takes its meaning from “Platonic and then Christian values which interpret the world according to the opposition between here-below and over-there, between the sensible world and the spiritual world”¹². From the political point of view, one should add, with Claude Lefort, the importance of incarnation, that is to say “the figure of the human-God mediator,” the body of Christ symbolising the union between human being and God, and between human being and human being. This figure survives in the Church, then in the complex apparatus of the king’s two bodies, mortal and immortal—the immortal body being transmitted from one sovereign to the other at the death of the first¹³. Recent works show, however, that modern political thought owes far more than is believed to a reinterpretation of Jewish sources¹⁴. It nonetheless remains that, whatever the transfers “of beliefs that […] maintain the mystery of incarnation in the sacred image of the People […] of the Nation,” a “historically arrived disentanglement of the religious and the political” took place at the dawn of the nineteenth century, on the occasion of what Lefort, with Tocqueville, calls the “democratic revolution,” which, as far as France is concerned, came in the wake of the French Revolution. To insist, as Lefort does, on the historical character of this phenomenon, is to remark that the religious from which the political has disentangled itself was not “the religious in general, but [the] Christian religious”¹⁵.

One could, to be sure, show that thanks to this disentanglement a properly political space, devoid of any reference to a foundation outside the world, was able to free itself, and that, from one country to another, Jewish citizens were able to engage in the political field or to occupy functions within the State, despite the development of antisemitism throughout the nineteenth century—which one should moreover analyse in connection with the various decrees of juridical and political emancipation of the Jews which were staggered in Europe from 1791 to 1917. It is in this context that modern Zionism was born, a good number of whose actors thought and acted within the framework of political modernity. The founding of the State of Israel inherited from this, insofar as the laws there are based neither on a transcendence nor even on Toraic legislation, and can be modified by human powers. While the Supreme Court can be petitioned by rabbinic instances, their requests are not examined by such a standard. As Claude Klein writes: “All references to religious law must, in order to be applicable in positive law, be adopted by the ‘secular’ legislator, that is to say, the Knesset”¹⁶. One cannot, however, ignore the prevalence of schemas drawn from the Hebrew Bible in Zionist representations. It suffices to read the 1948 Declaration of Independence. On the one hand, the “founding principles” of the State of Israel are “freedom, justice, and peace,” “equality of social and political rights [granted] to all its citizens without distinction of belief, race, or sex,” as well as “full freedom of conscience, of worship, of education, and of culture.” To be sure, freedom, justice, and peace are referred to the teaching of the prophets of Israel, but they are founded neither in God nor on the authority of the Torah, and join the earthly universality of human rights such as equality and freedom of conscience. But, on the other hand, the entire Declaration is traversed by the thematic of return and rebirth to an ancestral land whose memory has been transmitted by the Bible—but a secularised Bible, since envisaged as a historical document, severed from its Christian interpretations without however being referred to its status as divine word. Ben-Yehuda inscribes himself entirely in this perspective: no resurrection of the Hebrew language without return to “the land of the fathers.”

From this point of view, the Zionist secularisation of Judaism is an interesting case of secularisation of a religious other than Christianity, foreign to any perspective of incarnation of the divine through the intermediary of a human-God mediator. Scholem’s letter goes to the heart of its most singular and even unique character: Hebrew, an ancient language preserved for centuries in books and liturgy, has become a living language again¹⁷.

If the prefix “re-” insists in the Zionist vocabulary—return, rebirth, and even revolution—ressusciter (“to resurrect, to revive”) more specifically designates the reactualisation of Hebrew¹⁸, as if it were returning to life after remaining for centuries in an intermediate state between the dead and the living. From this point on, if the rebirth of Hebrew presupposes an initiative of return to ancient Hebrew in order to adapt it to a profane use, Scholem evokes a possible return of sacred Hebrew, and thereby of the sacred itself. Hence the thought of “the spectral and the haunting which, according to Derrida, obsesses Scholem’s confession”¹⁹: with Hebrew, something returns of itself independently of the intention and representations of speakers. Scholem calls “voice of God” what returns or risks returning. A mysterious expression that might rather incite us, the secular, to turn away from such a warning.

The ideology of modern Hebrew and the unsecularisable content of sacred Hebrew

In Langue sacrée, langue parlée (Sacred Language, Spoken Language), apart from Zali Gurevitch²⁰, all are sabras, like the director herself. While Haïm Gouri²¹, born in 1923 in Tel Aviv, belongs to the first generation of Hebrew speakers, the others, born just after the war to parents who came from elsewhere as did N. Aviv, could be those children supposed no longer to know any other language who preoccupy Scholem²². Zionism shared with other nationalisms the political ambition of linguistic unification, but it also aimed to gather together on a single territory Jews come from a multitude of countries. In D’une langue à l’autre (From One Language to Another), the film she made just before this one, N. Aviv evoked in a prologue the common schema of “the new man speaking, thinking, and dreaming only in Hebrew” and explored the repressed of other languages, and thereby of the diasporic past, which made a return within this instituted monolingualism. In Langue sacrée, langue parlée, the writers and poets who, like those of the other film, speak of their Hebrew language, teach us above all how secularised Hebrew has collided and continues to collide with what one might call an unsecularisable sacred dimension. The double effacement of diasporic culture, “first by the Shoah, then by Hebrew Zionist culture,” evoked by Michal Govrin²³, intersects with certain stakes of D’une langue à l’autre. But Langue sacrée, langue parlée concerns the return of another type of repressed that insists at the very heart of the language spoken by all. It inhabits the filmmaker, durably impressed by Scholem’s letter, which she has read and reread without ever being certain of understanding it fully. However, through the polyphony of the words she gathers, thanks to a unique cinematographic apparatus²⁴, one understands that sacred Hebrew has not disappeared either from Israeli space or from modern language itself. It still resounds, and the women and men of the film, particularly sensitive as writers and poets to the dimension of language, live, in contact with it, an experience of proximity and strangeness that comes to disturb the modern Hebrew they speak and write.

The secularisation of the sacred language went hand in hand with the deployment of what one might call, with Yitzhak Laor²⁵, an “ideology of [modern] Hebrew.” H. Gouri, who intervenes first in the film, is of the first generation of children for whom Hebrew was the only spoken language. The Bible, “figurehead of the secular return to Zion,” was the book with which he grew up, and he recalls the visits to places with biblical names organised for the pupils. A “sacred work translated into all languages,” the Bible had become a “geography book.” Unlike H. Gouri, Y. Laor received modern Hebrew as an inheritance, but it came to him “wrapped in much verbiage.” In his education, the rebirth of this language was presented as the at-last-realised dream of all previous generations. If today this “verbiage” appears to him as a mystification, it is because the presentation of the Bible as “the exclusive source of our Hebrew” amounted to excluding rabbinic Hebrew and the Talmud, “that immense existential poem that constitutes Judaism” according to M. Govrin—such an exclusion referring back to the long-maintained negative relation of Zionism to the Galut. In D’une langue à l’autre, Haviva Pedaya²⁶, who will also intervene in Langue sacrée, langue parlée, evoked the politicisation of Hebrew vocabulary that Zionism overloads with meanings, and which paradoxically “impoverishes the language.” She gives as an example the word “purification” (tahorah), ritually linked to cleanliness, beauty, immersion, or integrity, but which can be used in the “horrible” expression “purification of the territory.” Or again, according to Roy Greenwald²⁷, the word bita’hone which in the Bible means trust and becomes security in Hebrew in the military sense of the word.

The writers, poets, and musicians of the film D’une langue à l’autre evoked the way they would rediscover, in their artistic work, the presence within themselves of the various languages of their immigrant parents—but not only that, since a Palestinian-Israeli poet and actress also speak in it. In Langue sacrée, langue parlée, ancient Hebrew makes its persistence felt otherwise, and in various ways. From a family originally from Morocco, Shimon Adaf²⁸ used to hear it in the synagogue, while for H. Pedaya it is the daily life of her own family, come from Iraq, that still holds something of a Judeo-Arab space foreign to the profane/sacred distinction, so much does “the music of liturgical poetry accompany life” from morning to evening. For both of them, the emigration of their parents went hand in hand with the repression of this traditional part that was essential to their experience. The paths by which the others, as it were, came upon rabbinic or liturgical Hebrew are diverse. M. Govrin, raised in a family “apparently without ties to tradition,” evokes “the immense, mysterious books, with their closely set letters and strange page layout” of the family library. Called just as mysteriously the Talmud, it is a “tunnel in time” that opened for her, with at the end her “unknown grandparents.” Roy Greenwald, for his part, recalls the synagogue of his pious childhood and the “oral sensation” of sacred Hebrew, whereas it is the writing work of Y. Laor that deliberately brought him back to rabbinic Hebrew, which had been “thrown overboard.” Michal Naaman²⁹, for her part, rediscovers, thanks to her brother’s research, another way of reading the biblical narratives which “construct the origin as foreign,” while the sacred language reaches her as a “fragmented document of which pieces have disappeared.”

Beyond an approach that goes counter to the Zionist ideology of Hebrew, it is the way the protagonists of Langue sacrée, langue parlée bear witness to an unsecularisable proper to what, with Walter Benjamin, one might call the “content” of the ancient Hebrew language³⁰, which endures within the modern language. This film allows us to approach the entirely unique experience of secularisation of the religious to which Zionism gave rise. If the sacred Hebrew of the Torah is not spoken, this is not only because it is written, just as the Talmud of the rabbis is, but also because in the liturgy its verses are read aloud, “ceaselessly repeated, unchanged” (R. Greenwald), like the words of prayers. As H. Pedaya says, sacred Hebrew is a “language of listening,” in which one perceives not only meaning, but a vocalisation and even a music that is not that of modern Hebrew. When as a child S. Adaf hears it for the first time in the synagogue, the words “strike him, rustle in the air, burst like thunder,” traverse the body, as if he were illustrating what Scholem calls the “power of the sacred” of the Hebrew language³¹. Modern language has become a mother tongue, and when, as a child, R. Greenwald learned to read aloud the verses of the Torah, its words were like those of a foreign language, that of “the Father, the Most High in the heavens.” The strangeness did not come from a difficulty of comprehension—any speaker of modern Hebrew understands the meaning of biblical verses—but from the “oral sensation” of the verses put in the mouth, from their way of soliciting the organs of the body very differently from what modern Hebrew provokes. The Judeo-Arab officiant chanting standing before a chest evoked by H. Pedaya—intimately impregnated by the Jewish messianic tradition of which she is a renowned specialist—is the image of this coupling of voice and writing proper to the sacred language.

This is what G. Scholem explores, years after his letter to Rosenzweig. The religious thought of Judaism—and the mystical tradition in particular—has never ceased meditating the enigma of God’s word, a voice perceptible “through the medium of human language.” Without resolving the enigma, the strange image of the Sefer Yetsirah—the creation of the world by God by means of letters that he “engraves in the pneuma—the Hebrew word ruah signif[ying] both ‘air’ and ‘spirit’”—allows us to approach it³². The letters are adapted to human morphology, each being fixed to the five organs of the mouth. Inversely, each time sacred Hebrew is uttered by a human being, it is as if the voice of God were making itself heard through that person. A crucial moment of Langue sacrée, langue parlée is the one in which the singer-actress Victoria Hanna interprets this passage from the Sefer Yetsirah with arresting intensity. We see her, a magnificent face filmed frontally, pronouncing these letters one by one, the gestures of her long hands designating progressively the organs to which they correspond, but above all V. Hanna makes resonate the rhythmic power not of a roar, but of a voice articulated in phonemes that are not in themselves signifying, but susceptible of an infinity of combinations, opening then “infinitely to interpretation”³³, as Scholem writes. This voice traverses the body of the one who psalmodises, and it touches us, even us (me) who do not understand Hebrew. This experience is central to the experience of traditional Judaism. Henceforth, is it not this voice, this orality, that is unsecularisable when it resounds in the liturgy, pronounced and sung by the officiant?³⁴

But Scholem also writes that “the power of the sacred often seems to speak to us”—to us (not to me), the speakers of modern Hebrew—“in this ‘debased and spectral language,’ in this ‘phantasmagoric Volapük’”³⁵? In the film, Ronit Matalon³⁶ speaks of “strata” and R. Greenwald speaks of “layers” of Hebrew. He says that they “coexist in one and the same Hebrew” and blur in his mouth: “the words, instead of being said in prayer, unchanged, become spoken: the language of the verses becomes political, the Bible becomes political, and the political becomes Bible.” A single word passes from prayer to political language, from one connotation to another. The poetic language of the verses of the Bible or that of prayer are not the only layers of ancient Hebrew in modern Hebrew; there is also the Hebrew of the Mishnah or that of the Talmud, with Aramaic in addition. In the terms of S. Adaf, the ancient and the new are intimately knotted, according to the image of the depth and the surface: “what gives depth to my poems is indeed this language hovering like a spirit, the Holy Spirit hovering above the abyss³⁷. And if I eliminate it, I also eliminate my language, I kill my Hebrew.”

Literature and politics

Scholem’s letter is structured by strong oppositions. The “Volapük” and the “debased and spectral language” oppose themselves to “the words crammed with meaning” of the sacred language³⁸. This opposition is also that of the sacred/pure and the profane/impure, or again, according to Derrida’s reading, of the originary language—non-conceptual, non-instrumental, non-technical, whose essence is the Name—a full language as opposed to a formalisable, technical, and empty language³⁹. But what one hears in N. Aviv’s film goes beyond this deploration. Thus M. Naaman considers that, if ignorance of the cultural heritage gives rise to degradations of the sacred language, and if H. Gouri himself voices his disquiet before the “impoverishment of the language” linked to the victory of Hebrew, of which he nonetheless rejoices, the unexpected counterpart of this is a permanent reinvention, a creativity, a new freedom. The undeniable success of Zionism in having made of Hebrew, in so little time, a spoken and living language, also launches this language into an adventure that goes beyond the intentions of its promoters. Hebrew, declared the poet Salman Masalha⁴⁰ in D’une langue à l’autre, “belongs to whoever speaks it and to whoever writes it.” It was certainly imposed by the new State on the Palestinian Arabs, but they have acquired it and it has also become their property: “Hebrew no longer belongs to the Jews […] it belongs to this region, like Arabic and other Semitic languages.”

If in a general way the poetic and literary exploration of the protagonists of Langue sacrée, langue parlée collides with an ideology of Hebrew that they criticise, none wishes to return to a language pure of all contamination, since all of them write in modern Hebrew and hold to it above all. They insist rather on the openings that this altneu language allows, when it is put to work by literature or poetry. In this sense, what Langue sacrée, langue parlée makes us discover is also a response to Scholem’s not taking into account the literary space or of fiction, of a “[possible] revelation facing the menacing process of secularisation,” as Michal Ben-Naphtali notes⁴¹. The writers and poets of N. Aviv’s film situate themselves, each in their own way, at the point of encounter between sacred language and spoken language. For Edgar Keret⁴² it is a tension that fascinates him, that between “on the one hand, biblical or Talmudic, sacred, chastened language, and on the other hand, the language of the street, spoken, rough.” For Y. Laor the encounter of the layers of Hebrew is conflictual; they do not coexist. Between a passage written in modern language and another that he writes in rabbinic Hebrew, the reader needs a pause to catch breath, for they must pass from one rhythm to another. For her part, Ronit Matalon weaves the “strata” of Hebrew, going back and forth from the sacred to the profane, and even rubbing them against one another, even within the same sentence. “One does not judge,” she declares, “the words, sentences, or expressions one uses according to their origin, but according to their sonority, their use, their meaning.” As for H. Pedaya, she had to pass through a period of muteness before, in the modern Hebrew of her poetry, words issued from a fertilisation by ancient Hebrew came forth into the light of day, as if a gestation had been carried out in silence during this period and the closed chest that was within her had opened—the same as that of the Judeo-Arab officiant. For the poet Zali Gurevitch, the “marvel” of modern Hebrew is precisely the possibility it gives to be “completely modern, contemporary, experimental, and to return toward the archaic [in order] to reach a new beginning.” As M. Ben-Naphtali writes: “Does not poetic speech preserve the totality of secular usages of language while transforming them into art? Poetry and prose imply an active relation to language in which blindness or emptiness no longer apply, but on the contrary the metaphorical possibility of revealing new treasures in what has been frozen by rhetorical or liturgical overloadings; the power to throw a bridge between words that are apparently separated by a yawning abyss.”⁴³

The way in which the writers and poets of Langue sacrée, langue parlée evoke their writing work sketches in filigree the political capacities of literature in the contemporary context. It is E. Keret who says it most clearly. The sacred language speaks of the ancestral roots of the Israelis, of the patriarch Abraham. But, he adds, “things have happened since then.” For him, son of survivors of the Shoah, these roots are distant, and the “tension between slang and the sacred language, its leaps, its jolts,” raises questions about place, about the collective, thus perpetuating a “half-outside, half-inside position.” These questions are also those of M. Naaman, for whom the freedom of modern Hebrew speakers toward the language “must teach us to be freer, to nuance this claim of belonging to this place […] to recall that there has always been strangeness.” Z. Gurevitch’s retrospective glance at the different periods of renewal of Hebrew poetry does not make him discover a language pure of all foreign influence; on the contrary, each time it is such an influence—Greek, Persian, Muslim, East-European, etc.—that has given birth to a new poetic Hebrew. And this adventure is not over. For his part, the distance E. Keret took from Israeli identity led him to turn toward the writers of the diaspora (Sholem Aleichem, Bashevis Singer, and Isaac Babel) characterised by “a Jewish humour that deconstructs, not by a will to destroy or by rage, but by curiosity or empathy.” The distance taken by R. Greenwald passed through a geographical displacement (which is also the case of M. Govrin), on the occasion of which he discovered, in Yiddish—for which he conceived a love—another articulation of the sacred and the profane. The divine inhabits the Hebrew letters of Yiddish, but it “knew how to bring a carnival of words to life, to take a Hebrew term from the Bible and put a Slavic cap on it, castrate it, dress its hair, transform it.” Hebrew, he says with force, “represents the word of God, and Yiddish the word of His little Jews, the faithful.” M. Naaman operates in her own way a comparable type of alternative articulation of the sacred and the profane—indeed of the Name of God himself—in the titles she gives to certain of her paintings. In one, she doubles the letter Waw of the unpronounceable YHWH in order to render it pronounceable; in another, Way-Hi-Or, she cuts into syllables the Wayehi Or of the act of creation in order to make of it an act of sigh, “Way, the oy way, that Jewish sigh, the Hi, the weeping, and the O, the ‘either/or.’”

The part of the unsecularisable nonetheless subsists. Even in Orly Castel-Bloom⁴⁴, whose first books were deliberately written in current Hebrew, in which new words that sound strange are constantly being invented. But one never knows. If God exists, she insisted, by precaution, on giving biblical names to her children, “so that in case of misfortune—God forbid”—if anything were to happen to them, she could tell Him that she had respected the names. The last person to intervene in the film, O. Castel-Bloom clearly gives place to the apocalyptic sensation, to the possibility—“God forbid”—that Israel might no longer exist. Biblical names continue to be received as an inheritance, fragmented as it may be. To recognise this, to put it to work in writing, does not however induce the nostalgia of a theological foundation of the type that a political messianism à la Gush Emunim would wish to impose. Scholem is moreover not exempt from such a nostalgia. For him, as M. Ben-Naphtali writes, “language is the property of the absolute Other […] God will always serve as guarantee, as the ultimate signified of meaning, and will never allow anyone to unfasten the theological loop.” But she asks, “what happens when the notion of an all-powerful sovereign God becomes a vulnerable figure, subject to division?”—a division operated by writing. When Paul Celan writes the prayer “Praised be Thou, No-one (Niemand)”⁴⁵, he addresses an “empty non-name that takes the place of divinity and traverses all languages, all political theologies.” A silence which, arriving at a certain moment of history, would open the possibility “of gathering a people, a community, around an experience of muteness rather than around the vociferation of success or victory.” Do these reflections by M. Ben-Naphtali on the literary space, which go beyond Scholem’s perspective, not also illuminate the words of the writers and poets to whom N. Aviv gives a voice in Langue sacrée, langue parlée?