Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick Page B

layer of which is Gemara, containing commentary on Mishna. The exegetical voices calling to one another across the centuries grow more and more populous, denser and denser. A third-century sage will contradict a first-century sage; a fourth-century sage will disagree, and take the side of the first-century sage. A fifth-century sage will hold to a new idea altogether. If you were to stand on a mountain—Mount Tabor, say, or even Olympus—and turn your ear downward toward where the minds of the philosophers reside, you would hear the roar of impassioned colloquy below, like a wakening polyphonic thunder. And this would be Talmud, the fuguelike music of the rabbis conferring over the sense of a syllable out of Genesis.
    All this the Karaites refuse and deny. In the ninth century they become the rabbis' foes. Scripture! they cry, Scripture alone! They will not tolerate rabbinic interpretation. They will not allow rabbinic commentary. They scorn metaphor and the poetry of inference. Only the utterance of Scripture itself is the heritage divine!
    The rabbis (whom the Karaites call the Rabbanites, or the school of thought that clings to the rabbis) reject the Karaites as literalists. The Karaites, they say, see only the letters; they do not see the halo of meaning that glows around the letters.
    The Karaites ridicule the Rabbanites. They ridicule them because the Rabbanites declare that the Talmud, which they name the Oral Torah, was received on Sinai by Moses together with Scripture, the Written Torah. The Rabbanites claim that the sacredness of the Oral Torah is equal to the sacredness of the Written Torah.
    Literalists! retort the Rabbanites. Narrow hearts! At Sinai the minds of men were given the power to read the mind of God. Otherwise how would men know how to be civilized? How would we know how to understand a sentence—or a story—in Scripture?
    You understand it twenty different ways! scoff the Karaites. One says one thing, another says another thing. And this clamor of contradiction you call equal to the Torah itself!
    It is equal, the Rabbanites respond, because the radiance of Torah directs men's thoughts. Out of the soil of strenuous cogitation, which is the engine of holy inspiration, and which you Karaites demean as mere contradiction, burst the sweet buds of Conduct and Conscience. The Rational Mind is the Inspired Mind.
    The Rational Mind, argue the Karaites (but they do not notice that they are arguing Talmudically, since Talmudic argument is what they disdain)—the Rational Mind will not accept that the so-called Oral Torah, codified by human hands recording human opinions, is equal to the Written Torah given by God to Moses at Sinai! You Rabbanites indulge yourselves in delusion. There is in you no law of logic. Hence we depart from you, we reject all ordinances and adornments, inferences and digressions, alleviations and mildnesses, that are not in the Written Torah. We sweep away your late-grown lyrics that have crept into your prayerbooks. Our liturgy draws purely from Scripture, not a jot or tittle of it man-made! Away with your late-grown poets, away with your late-grown jurists! Moses alone stood on Sinai!
    Thus spake the Karaites. But the Jews until this day embrace the Rabbanites and their ocean of exegesis and disputation, of lore and parable, as fertile and limitless as the cosmos itself—while the Karaites are a speck, a dot, a desiccated rumor, on the underside of history. Sa'adia Gaon, in the tenth century, in his famous polemic against the Karaites, blew them with a puff of his lips into the darkness of schism.
     
     
    This was how, dimly, dimly, and little by little, I derived the nature of the Karaites at my typewriter at night, to the chanting of Mitwisser's esoteric recitations.
    And dimly, dimly, and little by little, like ink bleeding through paper, I came to believe that of all the creatures on earth, it was only Mitwisser, Mitwisser alone, who thought to resurrect these ancient dots