Dionysus or David

By Dr. Eugene Narrett

A distinguished scholar once commented that if Israel had a counterpart to the ecstatic dances for Dionysus it was “King David dancing before the Ark of God’s covenant” [1]. This strikingly vivid analogy is misleading.

The festival of joy, Sukkoth can clarify the gulf between the forms of ancient Greek and Hebrew joy. Dionysus is the god of the life force, of the amoral and irrational vitality that does not accept boundaries or constraints, overwhelming all forms and norms that impede its transformative urges. It is essentially antinomian, opposed to tradition and even to nature and the social order based on the laws of nature such as distinctions between the sexes. The antinomian, metamorphic drive of Dionysian power is violent and relentless as demonstrated by the great play of Euripides [2].

The joy of Israel is an ordered gladness expressing the code of encompassing order and an integrated life path contained in Torah. The vital power and energies released by the order of Torah is inexhaustible, humbling and ennobling: it protects in order to liberate. The paradoxical combination of humble nobility also is articulated by the worshippers of Dionysus, at least in The Bacchae but his energies exhaust themselves regularly like volcanoes, revolutions, fads or sexual passions. The metamorphic drive to overwhelm boundaries and dissolve consciousness in communal rapture leaves physical, emotional and intellectual pools, often of blood that soon are stagnant bearers of disease.

“The Torah of Hashem is perfect, it restores the soul” which is why David can dance forever and “not be stilled” unlike Pentheus or Orpheus who were destroyed utterly by the devotees of Dionysos [3]. “The orders of Hashem are upright, gladdening the heart. The command of Hashem is clear, enlightening the eyes” while the border-hating Dionysus clouds the eyes and confounds the mind of Pentheus, his cousin and sacrificial victim [4]. Confusion at every level, mental, sexual, emotional, socio-political ending in filicide is the passion of the sacrifice demanded by Dionysos who knows no boundaries. The simple are not made wise by Dionysos but conscienceless; they become automata who achieve ‘perfection’ in becoming like beasts (with which they typically are girdled or surrounded), beings whose grace is mindless, the attribute expressed in the name of Hadrian’s lover, Antinous [5].  

The apparent similarities between the joy of Dionysos and David mask an essential antithesis as deep as our culture’s hybrid, self-irritating roots. Discrimination, boundaries, distinctions are the substance of Israel, its ordered joy and the source of its endurance, connecting its uprightness (yashar, root of Israel) and wholeness (tam) with the Netzach Yisrael: the Victory / Eternity of Israel, a Name of G-d. The essential fact of Jacob is in his first given epithet, the ish tam, perfect, whole and beautifully simple man. Esav, the completed one, apparently self-sufficient is as red as the blood that leads to demon worship and enmeshes man in the power of the animal aspects of his nature [6].  These qualities dominate in Esau, he is Edom, the red or bloody man referenced in Macbeth as a harbinger of ominously ambiguous might and eventually confusion of all norms and bonds [7]. “Done” is a word frequently applied to him and his deeds whose possibilities and timing obsess him. “Done” is a synonym for Esav. The Dominion of Esav – Edom is the one whose “doing,” like that of the witches in Macbeth seems like it never will be done; that he will continue ascending Jacob’s ladder forever. The promise of the Creator, “I will bring you down from there” speaks, “in the language of man” the truth that Esau (the West’s) primary hegemonic doing, its re-fashioning, beautifying and idealizing itself in imagery, for “game is in his mouth” will separate the fiction from the complex cultural body in an apocalypse leading to the elegiac fall of the fiction and its imperial machine [8].

The key point for understanding the dynamic instability of our culture is that Esav-Edom, deriving his power from a Dionysian approach to being resists, overwhelms and makes its own boundaries, creating perennial instability and dialectic conflict. Jacob-Israel modulates its approach to life by an integrated code (derekh) of being. Of David and Dionysos comparisons it should be said, ‘a miss is as good as a mile.’

It also is true that the dynamism of the West, this unique hybrid culture forever warring on its Jewish root in part reflects the embedded drive of the twins to unite their qualities, the task that would have given one wife to each, simplified and hastened the path to human perfection. Seeking to absorb the wholeness and Godliness of Jacob, Esau remains murderous so long as it pursues his drive to possess and displace, voracious actions that are the core of image-work and its apocalyptic – elegiac trajectory [9]. Jacob remains incomplete so long as his leaders disown the power the patriarch displayed when he wrestled with and outlasted Esau’s angel, the Satan. When he comes home to himself and puts on power with integrity and shlaimut, the root of shalom, Jacob will inherit his place, “the world will yield its produce” and know true peace: until then, he is in exile, wherever he is and the world is lost in a fog of violent power games. “When Hashem returns the exiles to Zion, Jacob will exult [and] Israel will rejoice” [10]. Zion is memorial and memory; it is manliness ordered in understanding and the feminine: water in fire; a complementarity rather than violent fusion of male and female powers such as seen in Dionysos and his Bacchantes.

As it suppresses and seeks to possess and displace Jacob, forbidding Jews to settle and dwell in the native land and calling the injunction a “peace process” the West infects itself and minds everywhere with a lack of true vision, replacing it with grand geo-political games. This is a perennially “exhibited anti-vision of the type now expressed in what is called literature and art; a culture the content of which is abandon and which, in boredom and plenitude” [11] numbs and dazzles the world with spectacles. In short, the anti-vision is Dionysian and the saving vision that of Israel: the “peace processes” and imposed with obsessive, reflexive impulse are the innate surge of Dionysos to efface the principle of boundaries with their intrinsic light and replace them with the darkness of a totally managed world state from which distinctions of language, thought, geography and history are erased. The darkness of our days reflects the glaring ascendancy of the spectacle, enormously enhanced to universal sway by the mass media, the work of our own hands turned to mindless, conscienceless infatuation similar to that described by von Kleist, to a loss of memory which is the loss of Zion to the cult of universal communion seen as an “orgy-porgy” [12]: orgia means “secret rites” and fitly denotes the diplomatic-economic schemes by which the dazzling smog extends its cloud.

Against this ecstatic fusion and loss of consciousness, Psalm 19, cited often above offers a paradigm of Hebrew derekh. Space and time, “the heavens… the firmament” and day following day declare the infinite, awesome and not fully knowable glory of the Creator [13]. They articulate his infinite truth and also precisely articulate the language ‘within Him’ in the creation, the grand alphabet and language that is the perceptible part of His constantly active Being, “stretching out the heavens.” The precisely articulated discrete “particulars” of existence contrast with the flooding tides of passion celebrated in Dionysos whose worship is, in effect, an exaltation of the flood, of the sleep both of reason and awe in ecstasy that recognizes no boundaries. But the Creator “set a boundary they cannot overstep,” confining them in channels and shores.

The key to the contrast of Hellenic and Hebrew, Dionysian and Davidic is how this song elaborates a stunning vision of the sun racing across the silent heavens, brimming with unspoken but articulate words, like a joyous bridegroom and “powerful warrior” [14].  Despite this glorious metaphor, David does not turn to apostrophize, much less worship the sun nor to identify himself with it as a Dionysian prototype. Rather, to negate this tendency within language, particularly metaphoric language and personification of natural wonders, David turns from it to glorify the Torah with seven attributes, joining his own articulation of the Creator’s wonders to the opening vision of the heavens as His written glory, an early expression of Torah. The principles of Hashem for Israel are “perfect, trustworthy, upright, clear, pure, true and altogether righteous.” These qualities make them infinitely comforting (nechemadim) and desirable, cherishing and nurturing.

Thus, Psalm 19 turns on a hinge in distinguishing Hebrew consciousness and perception from that of the Hellenes. The glorious articulation of nature is the language of God, not an armature for human identification or self-deification; it is not a template for idol worship, for the idyll of idle eidellion. Rather, the precise articulation of the Creator’s glory in the creation turns the discerning singer toward celebration of his code for human beings, Torah for Israel and laws of Noach (cognate with nechemadim the word that sums up the effects of Torah) for all mankind. It is apt finally to note that Edom, wanting to have done once and for all with Hebrews (Jews) Hellenizes the name of the best known Hebrew verses and thus their orientation. “Psalm” is a Greek word deriving from the verb psallein, “to play the harp.” Many of the ‘psalms’ are to the harp but the word translated often as psalm literally means “song” and the word for these songs generally is Tehillim, “Your praises” is one translation.

This is the essence of Tehillim 19: it presents the glory of the creation, subordinating the energetic and beautiful image of the joyous groom and mighty warrior to celebrate the ultimate articulation, Torah whose precision is the antithesis and rebuke to the surging passions of Dionysus, a recrudescence of the Hamas with which the earth was filled before the flood [15]. The distinction is that between inarticulate ecstasy and the corruption of language (and thought) and its refined and joyous precision. The allure of ecstasy’s flight from reason leads to violence as repeatedly shown in literature and history from the Bacchae, to the Nazis to Lord of the Flies itself a reference to a cult antithetical to the wisdom and humility of the Creator’s language [16]. Today we echo the singer of His praises by saying “from the man of violence [Hamas] preserve me” and we truly are speaking more of Esau, he is Edom than of those groups now instigated and employed by him in his artful games of contrived dialectic aimed at Jacob and the articulations to which he is the primary witness and rightful embodiment. It is necessary only to be shaleim, integral and whole and then the peace that comes only from Jacob, like the fountain of truth that comes from him alone reliable, will blossom from the earth as its truth, “day following day utters speech, and night following night declares knowledge” of this code and principle of existence [17]. “Happy is the people whose God is Hashem, the Eternal One. For the One, the Unborn and the Undying imparts his majesty to the heavens, the moon and stars tempting some to worship “the host of heaven.” Beside them, human beings can seem so small, a sense amplified, at first, by modern science. But as Robert Frost hinted [18], and as Tehillim 19 and 8 indicate, man is greater than these natural glories for he is endowed and “crowned” by the Eternal “with soul and splendor.” As told to the first man and woman, all natural works are subordinate to him and his eternal soul, “beneath his feet” [19].  The discerning and attentive person, recognizing himself thus crowned turns the glory back to the Creator who so ordered creation: “Hashem our Master, how mighty is Your Name throughout the earth!”

It also is central to the truth of creation that Tehillim 19 concludes with a verse repeated frequently in Hebrew prayer, one that like the refrain of Tehillim 8 turns glory, honor and attention back to the Rock and Redeemer Whose truth is articulate and precise, immersed in and bursting from the glory of nature. As Abraham asked, “All of this, from Whom,” and proceeded to draw the correct inference from the evidence of nature encoded in the acronym of the Hebrew words [20].

1. Nietzsche scholar and translator, Walter Kauffman quoted by Zev Golan, translator of Israel Eldad’s The First Tithe (Jabotinsky Institute 2008), 8

2. Euripides, The Bacchae (c. 404)

3. Psalm 19; the Bacchae 1070-1335 (Esposito translation, 2004); Ovid Metamorphoses Book XI

4. Psalm 19:9; Bacchae 767-861; 912-48

5. Psalm 19:8; Bacchae op cit; “Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre” (1810); note that the form of play in which von Kleist articulates his vision of human perfection (in becoming sub and super-human) derives from the Greek theatron, “viewing place,” the place where imagery and “the it”  is seen: id – idein. The “it” is the root of idem, “the same” root of identical (we might say clone),the concept by which identity loses its boundaries in sameness as in the Dionysian group-rapture and loss of consciousness that defines its ecstasy.

6. See Rambam and Ramban for their discussions on the prohibition of eating or drinking blood: for lowering the humanity in our nature to beastliness or for seeking the power to ward off demons, giving the latter a divine power these projections of human fantasy lack.

7. Shakespeare, Macbeth 1.2.1 in which a messenger describes Macbeth as “making strange images of death,” an epitome of Western poiesis and boundary confusion (“fair is foul and foul is fair,” the refrain of the witches is attuned to and perhaps elicited by what is ambiguous in Macbeth’s character who loses his soul by winning physical battles, not unlike “Esau, he is Edom” (Genesis 36:1,8,36); like a reflection or image, a treacherous inversion of life, every service he does is “in every point twice done and then done double”; he “doubly redoubled strokes upon thee foe,” 1.6.14-15, 1.2.38-9. as with virtual reality, the future and illusion consumes the present and vital.

8. Ovadiah 1:2-4: ; Rambam (Maimonides), Yesodei HaTorah 1

9. See my essay, “Blood, Earth and Doubling” and various discussions of the resemblance and difference of poiesis and meiosis.

10. Psalms 14, 53; as in Tehillim 94, both the Name and His powers (“God”) will restore Israel and shatter the enemies of its wholeness. The Name of Mercy will destroy the lie and image, enemies of integrity.

11. Eldad, op. cit. 15-16, from his Introduction to the Second Edition

12. See Aldous Huxley, Brave New World on the “Solidarity Day Services” in the Aphroditaeum, a monthly rite similar to worship of the Queen of heaven as decried by Jeremiah 44:15-19 inter alia, idolatry Rambam links to the unprecedented wickedness of women at the end of history (see his comments on Deut 32:19 in which he notes the phrase “sons and daughters” is an unusual inclusion of women in rebuke.

13. Psalm 19:2-5

14. ibid 5-6

15. Genesis 6:11, 14 and, inter alia, 6:2-14

16. William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954); on the collapse of language see Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), George Orwell, 1984 (1948) and  many other texts. A shibboleth of postmodernism is the supposed inability to communicate, an assertion of radical subjectivity and alienation, a form of the fragmentation of the mirrors made by the image-work of the West (Edom). Today also “we praise wanton sinners” an indication that a period of history is collapsing as the media machine drives the lie forward.

17. Genesis 33:18, Jacob’s return to Shechem, and Psalm 85:11-14, truth is associated with Jacob the ish tam (Genesis 25:27) and per the verses, “grant truth to Jacob, kindness [chessed] to Avraham.”

18. Robert Frost, “Desert Places” (1936): “They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars —on stars where no human race is. I have it with me so much nearer home…” The implication of Frost’s verse differs from the Hebrew perspective but his emphasis on man is similar, though lacking the grace and assurance of a loving Creator. 

19. Psalm 8, the glory of the heavens seems to teach human insignificance but the gift of soul and its splendor teaches man his strength, dignity and responsibility and turns back to reiterated praise of the Creator who gave man this crown, verses 2 and 10.

20. “May the expressions of my mouth and the thoughts of my heart find favor before You, Hashem, my Rock and my Redeemer.” Note the confluence of words, mind (“thoughts”) and heart entwining emotions in the articulation of thought and consciousness, a microcosm of the articulation of the heavens with the DNA of Hebrew letters. “All of this, from whom?” is an acronym for the Name of God as Creator of the forces and forms of nature.