PARTISAN REVIEW
It was a production of and a commerce with a single, almost pantheistic
God of an immediate reality, on which they could practically lay their
hands. Peretz could take their joy of life for his own, but his faith was
not of the same order and had no connection with the object of their
joy. His faith was, again, the pragmatist's, residing in usage-in parti–
cular in the uses to which the Chassidic joy of life, for him 'no longer
a final thing, could be put. The Chassidism of the preceding century
represented for Peretz a burst of creative activity and of the life-forces,
to a similar liberation of which he would have liked to awaken the Jews
of his own time.
Accordingly, he took the Chassidic ecstasies not as ultimate things,
visions, in the midst of appearances, that disclose the noumenal world's
unity in love, but rather as the immediate phenomena in a radiance of
this world. The vision is strictly of appearances in actual historical time,
but they are seen under a holy light. This light is familiar, though the
direction from which Peretz catches it is strange, a surprise: it is the
holy light of progress, enlightenment, brotherhood, the revelation of
that face of the Godhead in which liberalism seeks its own image. Not
that his Chassidic parables are meant as object-lessons in liberalism, for
their dialectical character makes a simple reading impossible-even as
Chassidic pieties, though there, of course, they mean what they say;
Peretz' liberalism is of his whole career, of the poet as well as the com–
munity-worker, and for the poet its source is the power of love, drawn
from the eros of Chassidism, and fulfilling for him the function of
attracting the nations into brotherhood.
His concern with Chassidic themes was thus not something sepa–
rate from the rest of Peretz' work, as Samuel states, but a synthesis of
all his work, corresponding to the balancing principle of his own char–
acter. This prit:J.ciple was the joy and love of life, the encouragement
of the natural creative forces which Peretz, anxious to prevent the disin–
tegration of the Jews through assimilation or stagnant orthodoxy, iden–
tified, for reasons of cultural continuity, with Chassidism. Nor did he
develop the Chassidic mode primarily for the sake of moral opportunity.
He was not basically a moralist. Though all his tales have a moral, and
he bitterly condemned, even vilified, the bourgeois spirit among the
Jews, his first judgment was always prior to morality: it asked, "What
kind of life is this, how much natural devotion, how much creative
vigor is there in it?" Likewise his liberalism with its doctrine of love;
this never degenerated into a piety, but remained a translation into
"politics of the spirit" of the value he placed on the life energies as
such. (At least, so I would go about to interpret the miraculous light
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